Team Leader - NLP

Description :

- Lead a team of software engineers working on OCR, NLP, backend, and cloud components.

- Provide technical guidance, code reviews, and mentoring to team members.

- Plan and manage sprint tasks, resource allocation, and delivery milestones.

- Facilitate collaboration across QA, DevOps, NLP, and product teams.

- Ensure adherence to best practices in coding standards, architecture, and documentation.

- Drive continuous improvement across development processes and team performance.

2. Technical Ownership OCR & Document Processing:

- Oversee the design and performance of the document processing & OCR pipelines.

- Guide engineers in using Tesseract 5.x, OpenCV, ImageMagick, and preprocessing libraries.

- Troubleshoot system-wide issues, including accuracy drops, queue failures, and latency.

- Own the roadmap for OCR accuracy improvements and automation enhancements.

3. AI/ML & NLP Oversight:

- Lead the integration and deployment of LLMs (Meta Llama, DeBERTa, etc.) used for classification, summarization, and metadata extraction.

- Review architecture and ensure proper implementation of NLP workflows.

- Oversee experimentation, benchmarking, and quality evaluation for AI/ML pipelines.

- Coordinate with data teams on model fine-tuning and training workflows.

4. Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps (Google Cloud Platform):

- Manage and supervise work related to GCP compute environments, VM provisioning, scaling, and monitoring.

- Ensure smooth deployment and reliability of APIs hosted via Nginx, Apache, WSGI/Gunicorn, and Docker Compose.

- Oversee OS migrations (e.g., Ubuntu upgrades), patch management, and performance tuning.

- Ensure secure implementation of SSL, DNS configurations, firewalls, and domain management.

- Drive improvements in availability, redundancy, and observability of cloud resources.

5. Backend Architecture & Development:

- Provide architectural direction for backend services built using Python (2.x & 3.x) and Flask.

- Participate in design reviews, performance optimization, and high-level API architecture.

- Ensure reliability, scalability, and proper error handling across backend components.

- Align backend design with OCR/NLP pipeline requirements and cloud architecture.

Required Skills & Experience :

Technical Skills :

- Strong expertise in Python, Flask, and distributed microservice architecture.

- Hands-on experience with OCR systems, explaining and guiding Tesseract/OpenCV workflows.

- Deep understanding of NLP, embeddings, vectorization, and LLM deployment.

- Experience managing systems on GCP, including VMs, networking, firewalls, DNS, and SSL.

- Solid knowledge of MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and backend messaging architecture.

- Strong Linux administration skills (Ubuntu), shell scripting, and system-level troubleshooting.

- Exposure to GPU environments, CUDA, and PyTorch is a strong advantage.

Leadership & Managerial Skills :

- 3+ years leading engineering teams or playing a senior lead/technical lead role.

- Proven track record of coaching, mentoring, and developing engineers.

- Strong ability to break down complex technical tasks and manage sprint delivery.

- Excellent communication and coordination skills across teams.

- Ability to drive end-to-end ownership of large-scale production systems.

Experience Level :

- 7+ years of total experience in software engineering.

- Minimum 2 years in a leadership or technical lead capacity.

- Experience handling AI/ML, OCR, NLP, or cloud-scale backend systems is preferred.

Soft Skills :

- Strong decision-making capabilities and analytical thinking.

- Ability to manage high production environments.

- Excellent stakeholder communication (tech + business).

- Proactive attitude with strong accountability and ownership mindset.

Preferred Qualifications :

- Experience managing cross-functional engineering teams.

- Familiarity with DevOps pipelines, CI/CD, and release management.

- Prior experience in OCR/NLP heavy AI-driven product environments.

- Knowledge of Docker/Kubernetes is a plus.