Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer - AI/ML and Data Platforms

$171K - $260K Jersey City, NJ, US Senior AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

AwsDockerKubernetesPython

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

JOB DESCRIPTION

Elevate your engineering prowess to unprecedented levels by joining a team of exceptionally gifted professionals and position yourself among the top echelon in site reliability.

As a Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer at JPMorgan Chase within the Chief Data \& Analytics Office (CDAO) AI/ML \& Data Platforms team, you work with your fellow stakeholders to define non\-functional requirements (NFRs) and availability targets for services supporting large\-scale data platforms and data lake ecosystems. You will ensure those NFRs are embedded into product design and testing phases, that service level indicators effectively measure customer and data platform performance, and that service level objectives are defined with stakeholders and implemented in production to support secure, scalable, and high\-performing analytics and AI/ML workloads.

Job responsibilities

  • Creates and delivers high quality designs, roadmaps, and program charters alongside the engineering teams, including data platform and distributed systems initiatives
  • Acts as a key resource and mentor for technologists in your area seeking advice on technical and business issues, and serves as a culture carrier and site reliability adoption champion for your team
  • Collaborates with others to create and implement observability and reliability designs for complex systems and data platforms which are robust, stable, and do not incur additional toil or technical debt
  • Uses enterprise\-authorized AI capabilities within the work environment to accelerate reliability design and operational decisioning (e.g., incident/post\-incident analysis and requirements traceability), validating outputs and handling operational data according to sensitivity and security requirements
  • Drives evolution and debugging of critical components, including platform and data system dependencies, by understanding application and infrastructure interdependencies and limitations
  • Provides comprehensive and ongoing guidance, tools, and solutions to support the firm's growth, including scalable data platform infrastructure and engineering best practices
  • Makes significant contributions to JPMorganChase's site reliability community via internal forums, communities of practice, guilds, and conferences
  • Leads reuse\-first adoption of AI\-assisted reliability workflows across SDLC/toolchain practices (e.g., testing/validation automation and production readiness), ensuring traceability/auditability, resiliency, and security controls across application and data platform environments

Required qualifications, capabilities, and skills

  • Formal training or certification on site reliability engineering concepts and 5\+ years applied experience
  • Brings an advanced understanding of site reliability culture and principles and a track record of demonstrating how to implement site reliability within applications, platforms, or large\-scale data systems, including strong understanding of SLI/SLO/SLA and error budgets
  • Advanced knowledge and experience in observability such as white and black box monitoring, service level objectives, alerting, and telemetry collection across distributed and data platform environments, including tools such as Grafana, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Datadog, and Splunk
  • Demonstrated experience using enterprise\-authorized AI capabilities within the work environment to improve reliability engineering workflows with strong validation habits and awareness of data sensitivity
  • Ability to set team practices for safe AI usage in operations (e.g., review/approval expectations and escalation paths) while maintaining resiliency, security, and auditability outcomes, ensuring compliance with risk controls and company\-wide standards
  • Advanced knowledge of software applications and technical processes, including distributed systems, system design, resiliency, testing, operational stability, and disaster recovery, with considerable depth in one or more technical disciplines
  • Demonstrated ability to communicate data\-based solutions with complex reporting and visualization methods and collaborate effectively across teams to drive incident resolution and improvements
  • Recognized as an active contributor of the engineering community
  • Strong communication skills and a desire to mentor and educate others on site reliability engineering principles and practices while building strong cross\-functional relationships

Preferred qualifications, capabilities, and skills

  • Experience with AWS platforms and managed data platforms such as Databricks, including platform administration and engineering support
  • Experience in building and managing data pipelines using Spark or similar distributed compute frameworks
  • Familiarity with big data ecosystem tools (e.g., Spark, Glue, MapReduce)
  • Knowledge of containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and orchestration frameworks
  • Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automation frameworks, and infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform)
  • Proficiency in Python or similar programming languages for automation and platform development
  • Familiarity with large\-scale distributed systems and data processing environments

ABOUT US

JPMorganChase, one of the oldest financial institutions, offers innovative financial solutions to millions of consumers, small businesses and many of the world's most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients under the J.P. Morgan and Chase brands. Our history spans over 200 years and today we are a leader in investment banking, consumer and small business banking, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management.

We offer a competitive total rewards package including base salary determined based on the role, experience, skill set and location. Those in eligible roles may receive commission\-based pay and/or discretionary incentive compensation, paid in the form of cash and/or forfeitable equity, awarded in recognition of individual achievements and contributions. We also offer a range of benefits and programs to meet employee needs, based on eligibility. These benefits include comprehensive health care coverage, on\-site health and wellness centers, a retirement savings plan, backup childcare, tuition reimbursement, mental health support, financial coaching and more. Additional details about total compensation and benefits will be provided during the hiring process.

We recognize that our people are our strength and the diverse talents they bring to our global workforce are directly linked to our success. We are an equal opportunity employer and place a high value on diversity and inclusion at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute, including race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital or veteran status, pregnancy or disability, or any other basis protected under applicable law. We also make reasonable accommodations for applicants' and employees' religious practices and beliefs, as well as mental health or physical disability needs. Visit our FAQs for more information about requesting an accommodation.

JPMorgan Chase \& Co. is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including Disability/Veterans

ABOUT THE TEAM

Our professionals in our Corporate Functions cover a diverse range of areas from finance and risk to human resources and marketing. Our corporate teams are an essential part of our company, ensuring that we're setting our businesses, clients, customers and employees up for success.

Salary Context

This $171K-$260K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1937 roles with salary data).

View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Company JPMorganChase
Title Senior Lead Site Reliability Engineer - AI/ML and Data Platforms
Location Jersey City, NJ, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Senior
Salary $171K - $260K
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 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 69% of the market. At JPMorganChase, 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) Docker (11% of roles) Kubernetes (12% of roles) Python (52% 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 $181,170 based on 12,692 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($215K) sits 19% above the category median. Disclosed range: $171K to $260K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.

JPMorganChase AI Hiring

JPMorganChase has 76 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, Data Scientist, AI Software Engineer, MLOps Engineer. Positions span Jersey City, NJ, US, Chicago, IL, US, Columbus, OH, US. Compensation range: $131K - $325K.

Location Context

Across all AI roles, 15% (590 positions) offer remote work, while 3,217 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,643 roles, $211,000 median); San Francisco (2,168 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,792 roles, $191,580 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 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 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 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). 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 (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) 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 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 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 $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, 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 $275,000 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 (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 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 12,692 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $181,170. 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 15% of the 3,823 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.
JPMorganChase 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.

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