How to get a data, analytics or ML job at an Indian startup

Data roles at Indian startups split into analytics (business questions, dashboards, experiments), data engineering (pipelines, warehouses), data science (models that ship into product) and, since 2023, applied AI (LLM applications, evaluation, fine-tuning). The posting usually tells you which one it is if you read the responsibilities rather than the title.

Who is hiring

AI-native companies (Sarvam AI, Ema, Nanonets, Observe.AI) hire research and applied ML engineers; data-platform companies (Atlan, Hevo Data, Acceldata) hire data engineers; consumer and fintech companies (Meesho, Groww, Pocket FM, CRED) hire analysts and data scientists attached to business teams.

What the interview tests

Analytics: SQL under time pressure, a case on a metric that moved, and experiment design. Data engineering: system design for a pipeline, a coding round, and questions about failure modes. ML / AI: a take-home or discussion on a modelling problem, plus increasingly evaluation — how you'd know a model or an LLM feature is working in production.

Bring one project where you can explain the data, the decision, and what happened afterwards.

Pay

Applied AI and ML engineering roles at funded companies are among the best-paid individual-contributor roles in Indian startups right now; analytics roles are paid closer to product and operations. Use stated ranges on the board as anchors rather than survey averages.

Roles right now

Data and ML roles are listed beside this article; city pages filter by "Data".