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About This Role
Required skills
- Engineering
- Engineering
About Anyscale:
At Anyscale, we're on a mission to democratize distributed computing and make it accessible to software developers of all skill levels. We're commercializing Ray, a popular open-source project that's creating an ecosystem of libraries for scalable machine learning. Companies like OpenAI, Uber, Spotify, Instacart, Cruise, and many more, have Ray in their tech stacks to accelerate the progress of AI applications out into the real world.
With Anyscale, we're building the best place to run Ray, so that any developer or data scientist can scale an ML application from their laptop to the cluster without needing to be a distributed systems expert.
Proud to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Addition with $250+ million raised to date.
About the role
Anyscale is looking for a Software Engineer to join the ML Developer Experience (MLDevX) team. MLDevX owns the experience layer of the Anyscale platform: the interfaces through which users and coding agents discover, configure, run, observe, debug, and productionize AI workloads. Every user journey crosses this layer through the CLI, SDKs, APIs, UI, Workspaces, MCP, or the workflows and integrations built on top of them. Together, these form the user’s primary interface into Anyscale, turning distributed computing from a systems problem back into a coding problem. We build the common contracts, tools, control-plane services, and architecture that power these surfaces.
You will work across the stack from developer tooling to cloud infrastructure and the Ray runtime. Manage long-running operations and make failures across jobs, tasks, actors, nodes, and GPUs easier to diagnose. The systems you build must scale with the platform, remain predictable through failures, and be intuitive for developers, programmable for applications, and operable by coding agents.
This is a high impact individual-contributor role with end-to-end ownership. You will work directly with users and field teams to identify high leverage problems, shape the product and technical design, and build and operate the solution. The scope spans the AI workload loop - data preparation, fine-tuning and post-training, serving, evaluation, and iteration as well as the developer loop: code, submit, monitor, debug, optimize, and re-submit. We are looking for someone with strong product judgment, a willingness to understand the user base, and the technical depth to build high quality software for everyone from a developer learning Ray for the first time to an AI-native company or enterprise running production workloads at scale.
A snapshot of projects you may work on
- Build the next generation of developer tooling and MLOps capabilities on Ray, designed for both developers and coding agents.
- Develop an agent-first CLI and cohesive SDK, API, and MCP surfaces with self-discovery, structured errors, dry-run support, and consistent behavior across platform resources.
- Work across the Anyscale Workspaces stack to improve the path from local code to distributed execution, including environments, dependencies, images, authentication, workload submission, and debugging.
- Build cohesive experience, tools and frameworks for the AI development lifecycle, including data preparation, fine-tuning and post-training, evaluation, production serving, dataset management, experiment tracking, and lineage.
- Build the path from a trained model to a reliable production endpoint, including model registration, deployment workflows, performance benchmarking, and LLM-specific service metrics.
- Surface observability across the CLI, SDK, UI, and agent-facing interfaces so users can diagnose failures across jobs, tasks, actors, nodes, and GPUs.
- Design open integrations using durable standards such as OpenAI-compatible APIs and OpenTelemetry, along with stable Jobs and Services interfaces for external orchestrators.
- Design and operate the highly available backend services and platform architecture that power these capabilities across serverless and bring-your-own-cloud environments.
- Work closely with users and field teams to scope, ship, and iterate on the product, and collaborate with distributed systems and machine learning experts to push the boundaries of AI infrastructure.
We'd love to hear from you if you have
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code
- A solid background in algorithms, data structures, and system design
- Experience working with modern machine learning tooling — PyTorch, MLflow, data catalogs, and similar
- Hands-on experience building and operating highly available services in production
- Strong product instincts and a track record of shipping developer-facing tools that people choose to use
Bonus points if you have
- Experience building and maintaining open-source projects
- Experience building and operating machine learning infrastructure in production
- Experience building highly available serving systems
- Experience using Ray
Anyscale Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Candidates are evaluated without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, disability, national origin, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal or state law.
Anyscale Inc. is an E-Verify company and you may review the Notice of E-Verify Participation and the Right to Work posters in English and Spanish.
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 8,943 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 75% of the market. At anySCALE, 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 $212,000 based on 11,866 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,000.
anySCALE AI Hiring
anySCALE has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in San Francisco, CA, US.
Location Context
AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $263,811 across 2,416 tracked positions. That's 24% above the national 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 8,943 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 175 entry-level, 4,132 mid-level, 3,268 senior, and 1,368 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (521 positions). The remaining 8,351 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 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 8,943 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,739), AI Product Manager (403), AI Software Engineer (402). 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 (175) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,132) and senior (3,268) 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 1,368 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (521 positions), with 8,351 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 $213,380. Top-quartile roles start at $264,148, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,310. 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 $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. 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 (1,422 postings), Aws (808 postings), Azure (638 postings), Rag (555 postings), Gcp (457 postings), Pytorch (433 postings), Claude (341 postings), Kubernetes (337 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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