Meesho - Director - Data Science - Machine Learning Models

About the role :

Are you a strategic thinker with a passion for solving large-scale problems using data? Do you enjoy mentoring high-performing teams and building ML systems that directly impact millions of users? We're looking for a Director - Data Science to lead a team of skilled data scientists in building intelligent systems that power Meeshos next phase of growth.

In this role, youll own the data science roadmap for a key business charter, guiding the team through ambiguity and complexity to deliver production-grade ML solutions. Youll work closely with product, tech, and business leaders to translate complex challenges into scalable, measurable, and impactful outcomes. As a people and technical leader, youll ensure model efficiency, system reliability, and scientific excellence while fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

What You Will Do :

- Lead, grow, and mentor a high-performing team of data scientists..

- Own all data science systems and models in your charter from strategy to deployment and monitoring.

- Collaborate with senior product, engineering, and business leaders to define and prioritize impactful AI/ML initiatives.

- Represent Data Science in senior leadership discussions and clearly communicate technical strategies, investment decisions, trade-offs, and business impact.

- Drive platformization, system architecture decisions, and ML lifecycle improvements across the charter.

- Ensure model scalability, performance, and cost efficiency, while upholding best practices in experimentation and statistical rigor.

- Guide the team in reading and implementing state-of-the-art research, and facilitate build vs. buy decisions.

- Lead RCA for critical production issues and improve system observability, documentation, and service uptime.

What You Will Need :

- Masters degree (PhD preferred) in Machine Learning, Statistics, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.

- 10+ years of experience in Data Science or Analytics, with at least 6 years of people management experience.

- Strong research background and knowledge of state of art in AI / ML.

- Proven track record of building and deploying ML models in production at scale.

- Experience managing teams of 20+ data scientists and delivering across cross-functional charters.

- Deep expertise in ML algorithms, experimental design, and performance monitoring.

- Strong coding skills (Python, SQL) and familiarity with Big Data technologies like Spark, Hive, or Redshift.

- Ability to translate business needs into technical solutions, prioritize roadmaps, and estimate effort accurately.

- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills with a bias for action and clarity in execution.

- Strong experience in building large scale AI/ML applications for areas such as recommendations systems, ranking, retrieval, search etc

Bonus Points For :

- Experience leading ML initiatives in B2C or e-commerce settings.

- Contributions to internal tools, open-source libraries, or research publications.

- Strong understanding of ML system performance trade-offs latency, cost, and throughput.

- Top tier research Publications in the areas of AI and ML, especially in recsys, IR and knowledge discovery.