Senior ML Infrastructure Engineer

$180K - $230K New York, NY, US Senior AI/ML Engineer

Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at Arlo?

Apply Now →

Skills & Technologies

AwsCatalystPython

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

Most of what makes American healthcare expensive isn’t medical care. It’s the machinery wrapped around it: middlemen taking a cut, fraud nobody stops, and billing systems designed to fight over payment instead of deliver care. The result is higher premiums, denied claims, surprise bills, and a system patients increasingly experience as adversarial.

Arlo is rebuilding health insurance for small businesses from first principles: making sure as much of every premium dollar as possible goes to care instead of getting absorbed by the system around it. We do that by identifying fraud earlier, steering members toward higher\-quality and lower\-cost care, automating operational overhead, and eliminating vendors whose business exists mostly to take a cut.

AI is the foundation that makes this work. We use it across underwriting, operations, clinical programs, and member experience to build an insurer that becomes more efficient as the technology improves.

We’re already operating at meaningful scale: profitable, hundreds of millions in premiums, tens of thousands of members covered, and growing quickly through brokers, employers, and partners. Backed by Upfront Ventures, 8VC, and General Catalyst, with a team from Palantir, YC companies, and longtime healthcare operators.

### About the Role

As a Senior ML Infrastructure Engineer, you will own the data infrastructure that powers our underwriting, claims, and operational workflows, translating complex business logic into reliable, scalable pipelines that the entire company depends on.

  • Own our data infrastructure and the core data platform pipelines that drive underwriting and claims.
  • Partner with data scientists and actuaries to turn business logic into production code, owning the underwriting pipeline end\-to\-end.
  • Set the standards for how we build, monitor, and operate data systems — establishing SLAs, on\-call practices, and monitoring that the team relies on.

### What You Will Do

To give you a sense of the impact you'll have, here are some initial projects you could own:

  • Underwriting Pipeline \& API: Own and improve the pipelines and API that sit at the core of Arlo's underwriting engine. You'll work directly with data scientists and actuaries to translate underwriting logic into production code and ensure the systems that run it are fast, observable, and reliable.
  • Claims Ingestion \& Enrichment Logic: Build and maintain the ingestion pipelines that bring third\-party claims data into our platform. You'll design systems that handle messy, real\-world claims data at scale and make it usable for downstream analytics, underwriting, and operations.
  • Company\-Wide Data Foundations: Architect and build the data infrastructure that powers operational workflows across the business \- quoting portal, cost containment, member engagement \- and extend it to non\-underwriting teams, including sales ops, finance, and clinical.

### What We're Looking For

This role is a great fit if you are an engineer who takes pride in writing high\-quality, maintainable code and is energized by owning data systems end\-to\-end.

  • A strong track record of building scalable data systems and pipelines in production, with deep proficiency in Spark, Databricks, and modern data processing infrastructure (AWS or equivalent).
  • Fluency across our stack: SQL, PySpark, Python, and Git. You write maintainable code and hold a high bar for code quality on your team.
  • The ability to own workstreams end\-to\-end with minimal oversight. You make sound judgment calls independently, flag the right risks, and make the people around you better through standards, reviews, and process improvements.
  • Strong communication skills and a highly analytical mindset. You can work with non\-technical partners — actuaries, ops, clinical — to turn requirements into action, and you test and analyze your own work before it ships.

### Nice to Haves

  • Prior experience in a regulated space like healthcare or insurance.
  • Experience supporting data science or actuarial teams in production environments.

### Target Compensation

$180,000 – $230,000 \+ equity

Why Join Arlo:

------------------

  • High ownership: You’ll get real responsibility from day one—our high\-trust team empowers you to run with big problems and shape core parts of the company.
  • Join an important mission: Your work directly influences how people access care and improves lives at scale.
  • Growth \& expansion: We’re moving fast, and as we grow, your scope will grow with us—new challenges, bigger opportunities, and rapid career velocity.
  • Apply AI to a problem that matters: Instead of optimizing ads or cutting labor costs, you’ll use AI to fundamentally reimagine how people get healthcare.
  • High pace, high collaboration: We operate with velocity, first\-principles thinking, and a team that works closely, openly, and with ambition.

Exact compensation inclusive of salary and any bonuses is determined based on a number of factors including experience and skill level, location, and qualifications which are assessed during the interview process.

Arlo is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on age, race, color, creed or religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, military status, sex, disability, predisposing genetic characteristics, marital status, familial status, status as a victim of domestic violence, or arrest or conviction record, as defined under New York State law.

Salary Context

This $180K-$230K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $181K across 1996 roles with salary data).

View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Company Arlo
Title Senior ML Infrastructure Engineer
Location New York, NY, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Senior
Salary $180K - $230K
Remote No

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 3,824 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 71% of the market. At Arlo, 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

Aws (31% of roles) Catalyst (1% of roles) Python (51% of roles)

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 $178,940 based on 11,900 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($205K) sits 15% above the category median. Disclosed range: $180K to $230K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,380; Mid: $160,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $243,000; VP: $250,000.

Arlo AI Hiring

Arlo has 2 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $225K - $230K.

Location Context

AI roles in New York pay a median of $210,000 across 2,448 tracked positions. That's 5% 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 3,824 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 119 entry-level, 1,813 mid-level, 1,472 senior, and 420 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 16% of the market (613 positions). The remaining 3,187 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 31 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 51 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 401 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 3,824 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,702), Data Scientist (281), AI Software Engineer (258). 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 (119) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,813) and senior (1,472) 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 420 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 16% of all AI roles (613 positions), with 3,187 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 $200,000. Top-quartile roles start at $253,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. 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 Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $142,800. 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 (1,968 postings), Aws (1,203 postings), Azure (882 postings), Rag (877 postings), Gcp (735 postings), Prompt Engineering (587 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (554 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

Based on 11,900 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $178,940. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
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.
About 16% of the 3,824 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
Arlo is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI/ML Engineer positions include ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

Get Weekly AI Career Intelligence

Salary data, skills demand, and market signals from 16,000+ AI job postings. Every Monday.