VOPA Off-campus Drive 2026 hiring Freshers For AI/ML Engineer | Bachelor’s Degree

VOPA Started Hiring

Role:	AI/ML Engineer
Batch:	Recent-Batches
Salary:	Up to ₹4.00 – ₹5.00 LPA *
Location:	Kothrud/Pune (In-Office)
Experience:	Freshers/ Experienced
Qualification:	Bachelor’s-Degree/Master’s Degree

VOPA Off-campus Drive 2026 hiring Freshers For AI/ML Engineer | Bachelor’s Degree

Job Description

About the Role

VOPA Off-campus Drive 2026. We are looking for a passionate and technically strong AI/ML Engineer to join our team.

This is a hands-on engineering role with a research orientation. You will work on fine-tuning open-source models, designing machine learning pipelines, and deploying production-ready AI systems at scale.

Our key focus areas include:

• Handwritten answer evaluation
• Marathi Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Computer Vision for Indic scripts
• Low-resource language AI models
• Efficient cloud and on-device AI inference

What makes this role exciting?

We have already shipped a fine-tuned vision model (Gemma 4 31B using Unsloth and LoRA) that surpasses many state-of-the-art models on Marathi children’s handwriting recognition.

You will build on this foundation, improve existing systems, and explore new approaches to solving challenging AI problems.

Important: This is not a data annotation or prompt engineering role. We are looking for someone who understands how machine learning models work internally.

Key Responsibilities

1. Model Fine-Tuning & Training

• Fine-tune open-source LLMs and vision models using LoRA, QLoRA, and other Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques.
• Work with Hugging Face Transformers, Unsloth, and PEFT libraries.
• Optimize GPU training performance and resource utilization.
• Experiment with model architectures for domain-specific educational applications.

2. Computer Vision & Speech AI

• Develop models for Marathi handwriting recognition and answer evaluation.
• Work on speech recognition systems for Marathi and other Indic languages.
• Design AI-based rubric scoring and evaluation mechanisms.
• Handle noisy, inconsistent, and low-resource real-world datasets.

3. Model Deployment & Optimization

• Deploy fine-tuned models to AWS infrastructure, including ECS/Fargate and GPU inference endpoints.
• Optimize inference performance, latency, throughput, and infrastructure cost.
• Explore quantization, batching, ONNX, TensorRT, and other inference optimization techniques.
• Investigate on-device AI deployment for Android applications.

4. ML Pipelines & Evaluation

• Build end-to-end ML pipelines covering data preprocessing, augmentation, training, evaluation, and serving.
• Define and track evaluation metrics such as Word Error Rate (WER), Character Error Rate (CER), and Devanagari-aware benchmarks.
• Perform structured error analysis to identify model weaknesses.
• Improve model reliability and accuracy through systematic experimentation.

5. Research & Engineering Collaboration

• Read and evaluate recent AI/ML research papers.
• Translate research ideas into practical experiments and production implementations.
• Collaborate with backend engineers to integrate AI models into FastAPI services.
• Contribute to technical decisions regarding model architecture, training, and deployment.

Required Technical Skills

Model Fine-Tuning & Deep Learning

• Strong understanding of Transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, embeddings, and positional encoding.
• Knowledge of encoder, decoder, and encoder-decoder architectures.
• Hands-on experience with LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning using Hugging Face PEFT or Unsloth.
• Understanding of model quantization techniques such as NF4, GPTQ, and AWQ.
• Familiarity with learning rate scheduling, gradient accumulation, and mixed-precision training.
• Ability to diagnose training instability, loss spikes, and gradient-related issues.

ML Engineering & Programming

• Good programming skills in Python or Rust.
• Proficiency in PyTorch, including autograd, tensor operations, and custom loss functions.
• Experience with Computer Vision (CNNs, image preprocessing, augmentation) and/or Speech AI (CTC, attention-based models, audio feature extraction).
• Understanding of dataset preparation, labeling strategies, and train/validation/test splits.
• Ability to write clean, modular, production-oriented code.

Model Deployment & Inference

• Experience deploying ML models using Docker and cloud infrastructure.
• Familiarity with GPU-based inference environments.
• Understanding of inference optimization, batching, ONNX, TensorRT, and KV caching.
• Awareness of model size, latency, and runtime constraints for edge devices.
• Ability to balance inference cost, latency, and throughput.

Preferred Skills (Not Mandatory)

• Experience using Unsloth for efficient model fine-tuning.
• Familiarity with Marathi, Devanagari, or multilingual NLP/ASR systems.
• Experience working with children’s handwriting or speech datasets.
• Knowledge of AWS services such as ECS, S3, CloudFront, and Lambda.
• Exposure to model watermarking, AI model security, or on-device inference protection.

Who Can Apply?

We welcome applications from:

• Freshers with strong practical AI/ML skills and demonstrable projects.
• Engineers with 0–3 years of relevant experience.
• Candidates who have independently fine-tuned or deployed ML models.
• Individuals who enjoy research, experimentation, and solving real-world engineering challenges.

A specific degree or certification is not required.

We value demonstrated technical skills, problem-solving ability, and hands-on experience over academic credentials.

Our Selection Process

Our hiring process is entirely skill-based.

Candidates will be evaluated through a practical technical assessment designed to test their understanding of AI/ML concepts and their ability to solve real engineering problems.

Degrees and certifications will not determine selection.

What We Offer

• Real-world impact: Build AI systems used across 70,000+ schools, reaching millions of children.
• Meaningful engineering challenges: Work on low-resource languages, handwritten text recognition, speech AI, and edge deployment.
• Technical ownership: Take responsibility for research, development, optimization, and deployment.
• Collaborative environment: Work with a technically strong, mission-driven team.
• Growth opportunities: Contribute to AI research and architectural decisions as VOPA scales.High autonomy: We value outcomes, independent thinking, and engineering excellence.

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Apply Now

Interested in building AI systems that create meaningful educational impact?

Submit your application through our official careers portal:

About Company

VOPA Off-campus Drive 2026. Vowels of the People Association (VOPA) is a Pune-based organization working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and education technology for social impact. Our flagship product, NIPUN Maharashtra, powers foundational literacy and numeracy assessments across 70,000+ schools in Maharashtra, serving 5 million students. We build AI that works for underserved populations — real classrooms, real children, real impact.

VOPA Off-campus Drive 2026 hiring Freshers For AI/ML Engineer | Bachelor’s Degree

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