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About This Role
We are looking for a senior ML infrastructure engineer to build and evolve the systems that support model training, deployment, and production usage. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, infrastructure, ML workflows, and developer experience. The work focuses on production\-quality ML systems: reliability, scalability, observability, and usability for the team.
You will work on training infrastructure, deployment workflows, model serving, platform tooling, automation, and production reliability. Training deployment is a core focus, and experience with inference deployment is a strong plus. We care about engineering judgment, technical depth, communication, and the ability to turn messy ML workflows into stable platform capabilities.
What You Will Own
- Design, build, and evolve infrastructure for ML training workflows, training deployment, experiment execution, and production handoff.
- Build and maintain deployment paths for models, jobs, services, and supporting infrastructure across development and production environments.
- Improve reliability, scalability, observability, and developer experience for ML workflows and platform tools.
- Define interfaces, automation, metadata, artifacts, configuration, environment management, and lifecycle boundaries for ML systems.
- Collaborate with research, product, data, and engineering partners to translate incomplete ML workflow needs into maintainable systems.
- Support production usage by building clear operational tooling, debugging paths, and safe rollout mechanisms.
What We Look For
- Strong software engineering and infrastructure fundamentals, with experience owning production or near\-production systems.
- Practical experience with PyTorch and ML training workflows, including job orchestration, compute environments, artifact management, and deployment automation.
- Solid understanding of heterogeneous computing and high\-performance computing, especially for ML training or serving workloads.
- Good understanding of model lifecycle concerns: data, configs, checkpoints, artifacts, reproducibility, rollout, rollback, and observability.
- Ability to build reliable platform abstractions without hiding the important details ML practitioners need to control.
- Clear technical and product sense: you can prioritize platform work that unlocks real training or deployment velocity.
- High standards for engineering quality, including tests, documentation, debugging tools, and maintainable system design.
Tech Stack You May Work With
- Python
- PyTorch
- Heterogeneous computing and high\-performance computing
- ML training pipelines, job orchestration, compute scheduling, containers, and deployment automation
- Model artifacts, metadata, storage, experiment tracking, and configuration systems
- Model serving, inference deployment, APIs, queues, and observability tools
- Docker, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, GPUs, and internal platform tooling
Bonus Points
- Experience building training deployment systems, model release workflows, or ML platform tooling for research and production teams.
- Experience with inference deployment, model serving, online/offline evaluation, performance tuning, or rollout safety.
- Experience with distributed training, GPU infrastructure, workload scheduling, artifact/version management, or reproducibility tooling.
- Understanding of CUDA, GPU architecture, or low\-level performance optimization.
- Experience with open\-source inference and serving frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT, Triton, or similar systems.
- Experience migrating ad hoc notebooks, scripts, or manual ML processes into reliable platform workflows.
This Role May Not Be a Fit If
- You mainly want to train models personally and do not enjoy building infrastructure for others to use.
- You are comfortable with manual ML workflows and do not care about reproducibility, deployment, or operational quality.
- You prefer narrow implementation tasks and do not want to reason about system boundaries, platform UX, or long\-term maintenance.
- You over\-abstract ML workflows without understanding where researchers and engineers need control and visibility.
Why This Role Matters
ML teams move faster when training, deployment, and production usage are supported by reliable infrastructure instead of scattered scripts and manual processes. This role will directly shape how models move from experimentation to production, how safely they are deployed, and how efficiently the team can iterate. For the right person, it is a high\-ownership platform role with deep impact on both engineering quality and ML velocity.
What We Would Like to See When You Apply
- ML infrastructure, training platforms, deployment systems, or model serving systems you have owned.
- Examples of how you improved training reliability, deployment velocity, reproducibility, observability, or operational safety.
- Cases where you turned messy ML workflows into maintainable tools, services, or platform abstractions.
- Examples that show your technical judgment, communication, and ability to work across research and engineering needs.
Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At MaxInsights, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $218,750 based on 3,817 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $230,000.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($300,000) and Research Engineer ($280,000). By seniority level: Entry: $120,000; Mid: $200,000; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,150; VP: $250,000.
MaxInsights AI Hiring
MaxInsights has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Santa Clara, CA, US.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 14% (508 positions) offer remote work, while 3,180 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,045 roles, $220,000 median); San Francisco (810 roles, $277,088 median); Los Angeles (397 roles, $215,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,708 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 102 entry-level, 1,705 mid-level, 1,469 senior, and 432 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 14% of the market (508 positions). The remaining 3,180 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($300,000 median, 21 roles); Research Engineer ($280,000 median, 147 roles); AI Architect ($254,798 median, 67 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,708 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,605), Data Scientist (310), AI Software Engineer (259). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (102) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,705) and senior (1,469) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 432 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 14% of all AI roles (508 positions), with 3,180 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $217,500. Top-quartile roles start at $272,100, and the 90th percentile reaches $325,000. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $300,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,890 postings), Aws (1,103 postings), Azure (877 postings), Rag (855 postings), Gcp (631 postings), Prompt Engineering (560 postings), Pytorch (545 postings), Claude (498 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
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