Associate Director/Director – AI Product

Job Description: Associate Director/Director AI Product

About Credit Saison India

Established in 2019, Credit Saison India (CS India) is one of the countrys fastest growing Non-Bank Financial Company (NBFC) lenders, with verticals in wholesale, direct lending and tech-enabled partnerships with Non-Bank Financial Companies (NBFCs) and fintechs. Its tech-enabled model coupled with underwriting capability facilitates lending at scale, meeting Indias huge gap for credit, especially with underserved and under penetrated segments of the population.

Credit Saison India is committed to growing as a lender and evolving its offerings in India for the long-term for MSMEs, households, individuals and more. Credit Saison India is registered with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and has an AAA rating from CRISIL (a subsidiary of S&P Global) and CARE Ratings.

Currently, Credit Saison India has a branch network of 80+ physical offices, 2.06 million active loans, an AUM of over US$2B and an employee base of about approx. 2,000 employees.

Credit Saison India is part of Saison International, a global financial company with a mission to bring people, partners and technology together, creating resilient and innovative financial solutions for positive impact. Across its business arms of lending and corporate venture capital, Saison International is committed to being a transformative partner in creating opportunities and enabling the dreams of people.

Saison International is the international headquarters (IHQ) of Credit Saison Company Limited, founded in 1951 and one of Japans largest lending conglomerates with over 70 years of history and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The Company has evolved from a credit-card issuer to a diversified financial services provider across payments, leasing, finance, real estate and entertainment. Based in Singapore, Saison Internationals global operations span over Singapore, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, with active investments in debt, equity, corporate venture capital, and technology.

We are seeking an experienced AI Product Leader to define, build, and scale AI-powered products that deliver measurable impact for a digital NBFC operating at scale. The ideal candidate will combine product strategy, technical depth, and customer empathy to shape intelligent workflows across our suite of internal and external applications.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Partner with executive leadership and business units to identify, prioritize, and articulate high-impact AI use cases that align with the firm's strategic goals.
• Formulate the firms AI "Build vs. Buy" thesis. Determine which capabilities represent a proprietary competitive advantage and which are industry-standard utilities that should be integrated via top-tier vendors.
• Manage the end-to-end development of AI products, from initial ideation and data exploration to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring in a production environment.
• Lead an agile, multidisciplinary team of data scientists, data engineers, and software engineers, ensuring project milestones are met and deliverables are of the highest quality, always keeping in mind resource efficiency
• Ensure that the data ingestion, cleaning, labeling, and pipeline architecture is rigorously scoped before resources are deployed.
• Prototype and validate problems/solutions using AI tools, low-code platforms, and pilot metrics before committing engineering resources.
• Establish monitoring and guardrails for drift, bias, hallucinations, and feedback loops to ensure product reliability.
• Drive integrations with enterprise platforms like AWS, Databricks, Oracle, Salesforce etc., using robust APIs and data contracts.
• Ensure governance, privacy-by-design, auditability, and compliance with customer InfoSec/legal requirements.
• Own customer pilots, define success criteria, enable Sales/CS with demos and narratives, and drive ROI realization.

What we are looking for?

• Proven track record in building enterprise-grade products with complex data, workflow, and security requirements.
• Strong discovery and storytelling skills to turn messy datasets and operational realities into clear product narratives and roadmaps.
• Technical depth to engage with DS/ML/engineering teams, understanding evaluation metrics, experimentation, APIs, SQL/Python, and data pipelines.
• Analytics-driven mindset with experience instrumenting funnels, guardrails, and data-informed product decisions.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-functional squads and influencing senior stakeholders.
• Ability to manage stakeholders across levels and functions from the C-suite, to technical teams to counterparts from other functions.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication including PRDs, RFCs, customer documents, and executive-level presentations.
• Comfort with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and scaling AI products from pilots to enterprise-wide adoption.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Bachelors degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or any other quantitative degree from a top-tier institute. MBA a plus but not required.
• 812 years of product management experience, including at least 3 plus years of shipping AI/ML-powered features (LLMs, RAG, NLP, detection, vision).

Nice to Have

• Experience with AWS, Saleforce, Databricks, Tableau etc., data models and enterprise integrations.
• Familiarity with MLOps tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone), and evaluation frameworks for LLMs.
• Understanding of model risk management, secure AI patterns, and enterprise compliance expectations.
• Experience managing budgets, evaluating SaaS contracts, and calculating NPV/ROI for technology projects.
• Prior startup or zero-to-one product experience.