Staff ML Ops Engineer

$213K - $272K Seattle, WA, US Senior MLOps Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

Kubernetes

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

ABOUT LVT

LVT is redefining how businesses operate in the physical world, moving beyond traditional security solutions to deliver AI-driven, actionable intelligence that makes sites smarter, safer, and more secure. Since pioneering our first mobile, solar-powered units, our commitment to scrappy, hands-on innovation has made us an established leader and one of the fastest-growing companies in intelligent site technology. We are building the next generation of solutions—from our physical units in the field to a powerful Agentic AI platform—that allows our customers to gain unprecedented visibility and control over safety, compliance, and operations. This is your chance to join a cutting-edge team that isn't just watching the world change, but actively building the technology that is changing it.

We’re a team that’s focused on growth and innovation, and we’re proud that our crew, products, and leadership are being recognized for it.

  • A Top-Tier Growth Company: Named one of the Financial Times’ Fastest Growing Companies 2025 and #10 on the Inc. 5000 Rocky Mountain Regional list for 2025.
  • Innovative Leadership: Our CEO, Ryan Porter, was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2025, and our CTO, Steve Lindsey, was inducted into the Silicon Slopes CTO Hall of Fame in 2024.
  • Product & Software Excellence: We were named one of The Software Report’s Top 100 Software Companies of 2023 and are a winner of the Security Today Govies Award for 2025.

ABOUT THIS ROLE

We are seeking a Staff ML Ops Engineer to own the model lifecycle as infrastructure that turns the path from research to production into standardized self-serve tooling. The model portfolio this platform serves spans both the computer-vision models in production today and a growing set of LLM, VLM, and agentic workloads. Bringing those generative workloads under the same lifecycle discipline: serving, version-pinning, evaluation, guardrails, and cost and latency monitoring is a part of this role's scope.

This is a senior individual-contributor and technical-leadership role. You will partner closely with AI/ML research, the application backend team, and platform and infrastructure teams. You should be equally comfortable discussing model-serving architectures, CI/CD and rollback design, polyglot service contracts, and production observability.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

  • MLOps: Own the model lifecycle end to end: standardized packaging, a model CI/CD path, a serving layer with stable, versioned contracts, automated deployment and rollback, and monitoring and drift detection.
  • LLMOps: Bring LLM, VLM, and agentic workloads under the same platform discipline as the vision models serving with models and prompts version-pinned as deployable, rollback-able artifacts; generative evaluation and regression suites that don't reduce to precision/recall; production guardrails such as input/output filtering and jailbreak and refusal monitoring; and token-level cost and latency observability. Where retrieval or agent orchestration is in play, own the operational seams (vector stores, request tracing) the same way.
  • CI/CD: Make the path from research to production self-serve and safe by encoding the security, observability, and on-call guardrails engineers enforce by hand today, so model owners can ship without lowering the operational bar.
  • API Boundary Ownership: Define and own the contract boundary between the model platform and the application backend so engineers integrate against deployed models independently.
  • Technical Mentorship: Set technical standards and mentor IC productionization work toward the platform, growing the function as the team forms.

OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE

  • MLOps & Platform Experience: 8+ years of engineering experience with deep ML-infrastructure / MLOps work, including building and operating a model deployment, serving, and monitoring platform in production.
  • LLM Ops: Hands-on experience operating LLM or VLM workloads in production including model serving or managed-provider integration, prompt and version management, generative evaluation, guardrails, and token cost and latency control.
  • Self-Serve ML Deployment: Experience designing self-serve ML deployment for other teams, including model registry and packaging, CI/CD for models, serving contracts, rollback, and drift/quality monitoring.
  • API Design: Strong systems and API design judgment across a polyglot boundary with the operational maturity to own security, observability, and on-call trade-offs.
  • Technical Leadership: A track record of setting technical direction and leveling up engineers (technical leadership; formal management not required).
  • Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

  • Computer Vision / video model inference at scale (GPU serving, latency and cost optimization).
  • Cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, Argo, or a comparable deployment stack).
  • Experience standing up an ML platform from zero on a team that did not have one.
  • Experience deploying AI models to edge environments (e.g. NVIDIA Jetson or similar).
  • Agentic and generative tooling: LangGraph, MCP frameworks, vector databases, and inference/serving platforms.

COMPENSATION

The beginning annual salary range for this role is $213,300 - $272,000 USD and is determined by location, job-related experience, and education/training. Your total earning potential is amplified by a bonus structure tied to meeting goals, and you will become an owner from day one through our employee equity program.

BENEFITS

We believe you do your best work when your whole life is supported. We invest in our crew’s health, families, and financial futures with a benefits package designed to support you inside and outside the office. Full-time benefits include, but not limited to: Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits (401k match up to 4%), and flexible PTO.

LVT IS PROUD TO BE AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. All candidates must pass a drug screening and background check upon employment. Some roles may also require passing a federal background check and fingerprinting. Must be authorized to work in the U.S. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, and/or to perform essential job functions, please reach out to your recruiter.

Salary Context

This $213K-$272K range is above the 75th percentile for MLOps Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $157K across 20 roles with salary data).

View full MLOps Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Title Staff ML Ops Engineer
Location Seattle, WA, US
Category MLOps Engineer
Experience Senior
Salary $213K - $272K
Remote No

About This Role

MLOps Engineers build the infrastructure that keeps ML models running in production. They own CI/CD pipelines for model deployment, monitoring for data drift and model degradation, and the tooling that lets data scientists ship faster. If ML Engineers build the models, MLOps Engineers build the roads those models travel on.

The job is fundamentally about reliability and velocity. Data scientists want to iterate fast. Product teams want stable predictions. Your job is to make both happen simultaneously. That means building deployment pipelines that catch regressions before they hit production, monitoring systems that alert on data drift before it degrades model performance, and self-service tooling that lets data scientists deploy without filing a ticket.

Across the 9,653 AI roles we're tracking, MLOps Engineer positions make up 2% of the market. At LVT (LiveView Technologies), this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.

MLOps demand tracks closely with production ML adoption. As more companies move models from notebooks to production, the need for MLOps grows. The role is well-established at large tech companies and growing fast at mid-stage startups that are hitting the 'our models work in notebooks but break in production' phase.

What the Work Looks Like

A typical week involves: debugging a model deployment that's serving stale predictions, building a new monitoring dashboard for a feature team, writing Terraform for GPU-enabled inference clusters, reviewing pull requests for the ML platform's CI/CD pipeline, and meeting with data scientists to understand their pain points. You're the bridge between ML and infrastructure.

MLOps demand tracks closely with production ML adoption. As more companies move models from notebooks to production, the need for MLOps grows. The role is well-established at large tech companies and growing fast at mid-stage startups that are hitting the 'our models work in notebooks but break in production' phase.

Skills Required

Kubernetes (4% of roles)

Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure are baseline. Most roles want experience with ML-specific tooling: MLflow, Kubeflow, Weights & Biases, or similar. Strong DevOps fundamentals matter more than ML theory. You need to understand model serving (TorchServe, Triton, vLLM), monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi).

GPU infrastructure knowledge is increasingly valuable as LLM inference becomes a major cost center. Understanding GPU scheduling, multi-node training setups, and inference optimization (quantization, batching, caching) puts you in the top tier. Experience with model registries and feature stores rounds out the profile.

Good MLOps postings specify their ML stack, infrastructure scale, and the problems they're solving (deployment velocity, cost optimization, monitoring gaps). Red flag: companies that want MLOps but don't have any models in production yet. You'll end up doing general DevOps instead.

Compensation Benchmarks

MLOps Engineer roles pay a median of $205,000 based on 151 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700. This role's midpoint ($242K) sits 18% above the category median. Disclosed range: $213K to $272K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. 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: $272,275; VP: $235,000.

LVT (LiveView Technologies) AI Hiring

LVT (LiveView Technologies) has 2 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Software Engineer, MLOps Engineer. Based in Seattle, WA, US. Compensation range: $232K - $272K.

Location Context

AI roles in Seattle pay a median of $226,100 across 973 tracked positions. That's 6% above the national median.

Career Path

Common paths into MLOps Engineer roles include DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, Data Engineer.

From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Platform Lead, Infrastructure Architect, Engineering Manager.

DevOps engineers with ML curiosity have the shortest path. You already understand deployment, monitoring, and infrastructure. Add ML-specific knowledge (model serving, data pipelines, experiment tracking) and you're competitive. The career ceiling is high: ML Platform Lead roles at top companies pay well because the infrastructure complexity is enormous.

What to Expect in Interviews

Interviews emphasize infrastructure and reliability. Expect questions about CI/CD for ML models, monitoring for data drift, and how you'd design a model serving platform that handles 10K requests per second. Coding rounds focus on Python and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm). Be ready to discuss tradeoffs between different model serving frameworks and how you'd handle rollback when a new model degrades performance.

When evaluating opportunities: Good MLOps postings specify their ML stack, infrastructure scale, and the problems they're solving (deployment velocity, cost optimization, monitoring gaps). Red flag: companies that want MLOps but don't have any models in production yet. You'll end up doing general DevOps instead.

AI Hiring Overview

The AI job market has 9,653 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 193 entry-level, 4,500 mid-level, 3,455 senior, and 1,505 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (568 positions). The remaining 9,010 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. 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).

MLOps demand tracks closely with production ML adoption. As more companies move models from notebooks to production, the need for MLOps grows. The role is well-established at large tech companies and growing fast at mid-stage startups that are hitting the 'our models work in notebooks but break in production' phase.

The AI Job Market Today

The AI job market spans 9,653 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (7,301), Data Scientist (441), AI Software Engineer (438). 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 (193) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,500) and senior (3,455) 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 1,505 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (568 positions), with 9,010 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 $213,400. Top-quartile roles start at $264,230, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,400. 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 $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 (1,605 postings), Aws (916 postings), Azure (724 postings), Rag (634 postings), Gcp (522 postings), Pytorch (495 postings), Kubernetes (384 postings), Claude (383 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 151 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for MLOps Engineer positions is $205,000. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure are baseline. Most roles want experience with ML-specific tooling: MLflow, Kubeflow, Weights & Biases, or similar. Strong DevOps fundamentals matter more than ML theory. You need to understand model serving (TorchServe, Triton, vLLM), monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi).
About 6% of the 9,653 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.
LVT (LiveView Technologies) 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 MLOps Engineer positions include ML Platform Lead, Infrastructure Architect, Engineering Manager. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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