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Principal ML System Engineer

Leads the technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards for a company-wide ML platform supporting model development, deployment, serving, and monitoring. The role requires principal-level expertise in Python and Java, scalable MLOps, cloud infrastructure, security, and technical leadership across teams.

About the job

Responsibilities

  • Set the technical vision and strategy for the machine learning platform supporting traditional ML and generative AI development.
  • Partner with product and engineering leadership to translate business objectives into a multi-quarter ML platform strategy and roadmap.
  • Define reference architectures and standards for scalable data and ML pipelines covering model training, evaluation, deployment, and serving.
  • Establish company-wide MLOps practices, including model CI/CD, model registries, feature stores, experiment tracking, and build-versus-buy decisions.
  • Establish reliability, observability, and performance practices for production ML systems, including monitoring, alerting, and automated remediation.
  • Define ML platform security architecture covering authentication, role-based access control, audit logging, and compliance monitoring.
  • Define secure, cost-efficient integration and infrastructure patterns for existing systems, APIs, and data sources.
  • Provide technical leadership and mentorship across engineering teams and guide the technical roadmap for ML infrastructure.

Requirements

  • Expert-level Python and Java skills with strong software engineering fundamentals.
  • Deep experience designing and building ML platforms and MLOps workflows at scale.
  • Experience with MLflow, Kubeflow, Ray, and model-serving frameworks or equivalents.
  • Extensive experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud.
  • Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
  • Demonstrated ability to set technical direction and drive organization-wide initiatives across multiple teams.

Nice-to-Haves

  • Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
  • Familiarity with Azure Machine Learning, Databricks processing and serverless environments, and machine learning frameworks.
  • Experience leading and sustaining critical cross-team systems.
  • Experience implementing security at scale, including role-based access control, multifactor authentication, network security best practices, and compliance monitoring.
  • Experience optimizing large-model training and inference, including LLM serving, for performance and cost.

Compensation

  • Annual salary range: $195,000–$217,000.

Skills

Python, Java, MLflow, Kubeflow, Ray, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, MLOps, Databricks, Azure Machine Learning, Llm Serving, Role-Based Access Control

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