Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at McAfee?
Apply Now →About This Role
Role Overview: \-Directs a comprehensive product strategy from product conception and definition through end of life.
Functions as a central resource with design, manufacturing, quality, test, marketing and distribution as the product(s) move through their lifecycle.
Directs those involved in the design, modification and evaluation of all phases of a specific product or group of products.
Formulates and executes long\-term plans for cost/profit control.
Promotes use of new technologies and industry\-leading trends.
Selects, develops and evaluates personnel to ensure the efficient operation of the function.
Employees matched to this job have responsibility for overall product(s) and people manageme Position Details:
The Opportunity
As the Senior Product Manager for Artificial Intelligence, you will design and deliver the next generation of intelligent protection for millions of consumers worldwide. This is a highly technical, high\-visibility role where you will sit at the intersection of advanced machine learning and consumer safety. You will own the strategy, development, and deployment of proprietary ML models, Large Language Models (LLMs), and autonomous agentic systems designed to predict, detect, and neutralize emerging digital threats in real time. If you want to build AI that doesn't just generate text, but actively protects human lives in the digital sphere, this role is for you.
Work Structure \& Location
This is a Hybrid position. Candidates must live within a commutable distance to one of our primary office hubs and be available for regular in\-office collaboration according to team needs. When you are not working on\-site, you will be working from your home office.
Eligible Locations:
- Frisco, TX
- Newport Beach, CA
- San Jose, CA
- New York, NY
- Toronto, ON (Canada)
*Please note: We are only considering candidates within a commutable distance to one of these specific hubs and are not offering relocation assistance at this time.*
About the Role
- Define the AI Roadmap: Own the product lifecycle for McAfee’s core AI/ML capabilities, transforming complex technical breakthroughs into intuitive, high\-value consumer protection experiences.
- Architect Intelligent Agents: Architect and deploy agentic AI workflows and LLM\-powered systems capable of autonomous reasoning, threat assessment, and real\-time user assistance.
- Build Robust Evals: Design, implement, and maintain rigorous model evaluation frameworks (evals) to measure accuracy, drift, latency, and hallucination rates, ensuring our models meet strict production standards.
- Lead Technical Prioritization: Partner deeply with Applied AI Research, Data Engineering, and MLOps to balance data ingestion pipelines, compute costs, model optimization, and inference speed.
- Guardrails \& Safety: Establish strict guardrails, alignment protocols, and data privacy compliance standards to ensure McAfee’s AI interactions remain safe, unbiased, and secure.
- Translate Complexity: Distill deeply technical AI capabilities and model performance metrics into clear, business\-oriented narratives for executive leadership and stakeholders.
Company Overview: McAfee is a leader in personal security for consumers. Focused on protecting people, not just devices, McAfee consumer solutions adapt to users’ needs in an always online world, empowering them to live securely through integrated, intuitive solutions that protects their families and communities with the right security at the right moment. Company Benefits and Perks: We work hard to embrace diversity and inclusion and encourage everyone at McAfee to bring their authentic selves to work every day. We offer a variety of social programs, flexible work hours and family\-friendly benefits to all of our employees.:* Bonus Program
- 401k Retirement
- Medical, Dental, Vision, Basic Life, Short Term Disability and Long\-Term Disability Coverage
- Paid Parental Leave
- Support and Community Involvement
- 14 Paid Company Holidays
- Unlimited Paid Time Off for Exempt Employees
- 96 Hours of Sick Time and 120 Hours of Vacation for Non\-Exempt Employees Accrued Each Year
We're serious about our commitment to diversity which is why McAfee prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other legally protected status. Pay Range: The anticipated compensation for this position is USD $124,380\.00/Yr. \- USD $204,330\.00/Yr. depending on experience and qualifications. Job Applicant Privacy Notice: Please click here to view and download the Job Applicant Privacy Notice, which applies to all McAfee job applicants who are residents of the state of California.
Salary Context
This $124K-$204K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1841 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 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At McAfee, 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 in Demand for This Role
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 $218,750 based on 3,817 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $230,000. This role's midpoint ($164K) sits 25% below the category median. Disclosed range: $124K to $204K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($300,000) and Research Engineer ($280,000). By seniority level: Entry: $120,000; Mid: $200,000; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,150; VP: $250,000.
McAfee AI Hiring
McAfee has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in San Jose, CA, US. Compensation range: $204K - $204K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 14% (508 positions) offer remote work, while 3,180 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,045 roles, $220,000 median); San Francisco (810 roles, $277,088 median); Los Angeles (397 roles, $215,000 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 3,708 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 102 entry-level, 1,705 mid-level, 1,469 senior, and 432 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 14% of the market (508 positions). The remaining 3,180 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($300,000 median, 21 roles); Research Engineer ($280,000 median, 147 roles); AI Architect ($254,798 median, 67 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 3,708 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,605), Data Scientist (310), AI Software Engineer (259). 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 (102) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,705) and senior (1,469) 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 432 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 14% of all AI roles (508 positions), with 3,180 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 $217,500. Top-quartile roles start at $272,100, and the 90th percentile reaches $325,000. 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 $300,000 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 (1,890 postings), Aws (1,103 postings), Azure (877 postings), Rag (855 postings), Gcp (631 postings), Prompt Engineering (560 postings), Pytorch (545 postings), Claude (498 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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