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About This Role
Join the company that's building the telemetry infrastructure for the AI era. At Cribl, we partner with IT and Security teams at many of the world's biggest enterprises, including half of the Fortune 100, to bridge the gap between AI ambition and infrastructure reality. As the AI Platform for Telemetry, we give customers the choice, control, and flexibility to manage and analyze telemetry for both humans and agents, so they can build what's next.
We're one of the fastest‑growing private companies and a leading player in a massive, fast‑moving market. With a global workforce, we're remote‑first and grounded in a simple idea: software is a people business. Cribl is the place where curious, collaborative people can do their best work, grow fast, and bring their full selves to the herd.
Why You'll Love This Role
You will help build Cribl Engineering's AI platform and productivity rails: the shared systems, runtimes, and workflows that let engineers use autonomous AI across the software delivery lifecycle. Instead of one-off prompts or single-feature AI experiments, you will focus on intent engineering, orchestration and harnesses, and production agent infrastructure that other teams can trust and extend.
You will work with a small, high-impact team alongside tech leads, principals, and partner engineering groups. You will ship systems that plan, implement, review, test, and operate work with strong guardrails, then drive adoption until those tools become part of how Cribl builds software. You will also bring a builder mentality: use the product yourself to solve real team and Engineering problems, then turn that lived experience into better systems. Cribl strives to be a great place to work for everyone.
As An Active Member Of Our Team, You Will…
- Design, build, and operate production agentic workflows and the platform harnesses they run on (orchestration, tool integrations, shared context, extension points for other teams)
- Practice intent engineering: turn goals into clear specifications, rules, constraints, and acceptance criteria that AI systems can execute reliably
- Stay current on AI tooling and practices, and evangelize what works across Engineering so partners adopt proven patterns
- Engage hard in design discussions and healthy debate while the direction is open, then pivot with equal energy into implementation once the team decides
- Build observability and guardrails: tracing, regression detection, human-in-the-loop controls, safe rollout, and operability for agentic systems others depend on
- Own critical pieces of agent runtime: job isolation, scheduling, execution environments, secrets and access, and production operations in the cloud
- Design and operate event-driven architectures where it fits (queues, streams, webhooks, async job fan-out) so agentic systems stay scalable and loosely coupled
- Ship safely and often: keep agentic systems on automated CI/CD paths with progressive delivery and clear rollback
- Bring a builder mentality: dogfood what we ship. Use the platform to unblock yourself and the team, surface sharp edges, and turn real usage into product and platform improvements
- Compress software delivery loops by improving how AI helps engineers write, test, review, debug, and validate changes in real repositories and pipelines
- Partner across Engineering to understand workflows, ship tools that fit how people work, and drive adoption through playbooks, examples, demos, and enablement
- Evaluate build vs. buy; stay current on models, agent frameworks, MCP-style tool protocols, and the broader AI tooling ecosystem
- Define and track success metrics for adoption, quality, reliability, and satisfaction; use feedback and data to decide where to invest
- Partner on security and data access so tools are useful while respecting permissions and company policy
- Take designed projects from zero to production: own the path from agreed design through implementation, rollout, and day-two operability
- This position may include stand-by, on-call, or off-hours duties for systems you own
If You've Got It - We Want It
- Staff-level (or equivalent) professional software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems
- Strong TypeScript (and modern JavaScript) plus Node.js experience shipping production services; polyglot comfort is welcome, TypeScript is the primary stack for this team
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to ship quickly: design, testing, debugging, APIs/services, and code quality
- You have lived (or thrived in) a continuous deployment culture: automated pipelines, progressive delivery or safe rollout, monitoring and rollback, and a bias toward frequent, reversible production changes rather than infrequent manual releases
- Hands-on fluency with modern LLM and agentic coding workflows in production or serious internal platforms (not curiosity-only)
- Experience building backend services, integrations, automation, and internal tools; comfort across product surfaces when needed
- Professional experience with agent orchestration, tool-calling systems, evaluation or guardrail techniques, and connecting agents to reliable backend systems
- Familiarity with agent frameworks, orchestration layers, and integrating external tools and data sources into LLM-based systems (MCP or equivalent experience is a plus)
- Experience with event-driven systems: queues, streams, pub/sub, webhooks, or similar async patterns in production
- Observability fluency: metrics, logs, traces, and using them to operate and improve production systems
- Clear communication, documentation, and teaching ability; comfort driving adoption, not only writing code
- Good judgment around security, permissions, data access, and safe tool rollout
- Ability to problem-solve from first principles, make sound trade-offs, and drive work independently through ambiguity
- Nice to have + Hands-on Kubernetes in production + Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code for cloud provisioning + Temporal or other workflow-platform experience + Deeper AWS / cloud-native ops fluency (IAM, networking, running production workloads end to end)
#LI-JB1
#LI-Remote
Bring Your Whole Self
Diversity drives innovation, enables better decisions to support our customers, and inspires change for the better. We're building a culture where differences are valued and welcomed, and we work together to bring out the best in each other. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics in the location in which the candidate is applying.
Interested in joining the Cribl herd? Learn more about the smartest, funniest, most passionate goats you'll ever meet at cribl.io/about-us.
Salary Context
This $210K-$245K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 1623 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →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 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Cribl, 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 $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $229,300. This role's midpoint ($227K) sits 7% above the category median. Disclosed range: $210K to $245K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Cribl AI Hiring
Cribl has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in San Francisco, CA, US. Compensation range: $245K - $245K.
Location Context
AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $261,000 across 2,646 tracked positions. That's 23% 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 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 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 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). 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 (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) 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 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 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 $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. 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 $256,000 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 (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 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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