Machine learning engineers build, evaluate and deploy models that make predictions in production. The role has professionalised considerably: a few years ago a strong notebook could get you hired, and now teams expect versioned pipelines, monitored deployments and the ability to explain why a model degraded. India has a substantial reported shortfall of qualified AI talent, but the shortage is of people who can do the engineering half, not of people who have completed courses. Pune demand is concentrated in analytics firms and captive AI teams.