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About This Role
Our mission at Oura is to empower every person to own their inner potential. Our award-winning products help our global community gain a deeper knowledge of their readiness, activity, and sleep quality by using their Oura Ring and its connected app. We've helped millions of people understand and improve their health by providing daily insights and practical steps to inspire healthy lifestyles.
Empowering the world starts with living our values and empowering our team. As a quickly growing company focused on helping people live healthier and happier lives, we ensure that our team members have what they need to do their best work — both in and out of the office.
About the role
Oura is rebuilding how it builds software. Every engineer has agentic tooling, and our own pipeline already takes a well-formed ticket to a reviewed, tested commit stack. It runs interactively, headless, and on a cloud sandbox fleet, with its own evals and tracing. We are looking for engineers who use AI as a fundamental building block of both the products we ship and the way we build them.
That is a strong start on one stage of the lifecycle. The next step is the whole loop. As a Staff Engineer on the AI Transformation team, you will architect and own the system that turns agentic development from something power users do into the way hundreds of engineers across iOS, Android, backend and AI services ship every day. That means spec and intake, planning, implementation, review, testing, CI/CD, release, observability and incident follow-up, each with agents doing real work and humans keeping judgment where it matters.
This is a fast-moving, LLM-forward team. We prioritize rapid prototyping, iterative loops and AI-native development, with the speed of a startup and the reach of a product used by millions of members. You can work remotely from anywhere in Europe, or hybrid from our offices in Helsinki, Oulu or Tampere.
You will build the pipeline, measure it, and make it trustworthy enough that teams choose it. Success is measured in validated changes reaching members faster and safer: time to a trustworthy signal, escaped defects, cost per merged change, and how many squads run on the paved path because it is better, not because they were told to.
What you will do
You don't need to do all of these on day one, but these are the kinds of problems you'll own:
- Set the technical direction for the agentic pipeline: Make our existing ticket-to-PR pipeline dependable infrastructure. Own its architecture, including agent orchestration, context management and tool calling, and improve its reliability, throughput, cost and developer experience across mobile, backend and web repositories. Run it unattended where the risk allows.
- Close the loop across the SDLC: Extend agentic workflows beyond code generation into spec quality checks, test generation, automated review, CI failure triage and repair, release verification, and post-deploy signals, so the system improves from what happens after merge.
- Prototype fast, then harden: Get a new workflow running in days, prove it on real tickets with real squads, and turn what holds up into production infrastructure.
- Run AI in production properly: Agents in production take more than an API call. Own the eval sets, LLM-as-a-judge grading, versioning, tracing and dashboards that tell us whether a workflow change made things better, including the hardest case: a change that passes CI and is still wrong. Track the numbers that matter (merge rate, rework, time-to-signal, cost per change, escaped defects) and make them visible to engineers and leadership.
- Make autonomy safe: Design sandboxing, permissions, human checkpoints and guardrails proportional to risk, with privacy by design as the default. Health data, security and infrastructure changes get stronger controls; low-risk, easily verified work runs hands-off.
- Lead AI-native engineering by example: Set the bar for AI-augmented engineering across the organization. Show in your own work what a pipeline-first engineer ships, and raise the craft of the engineers around you.
- Drive adoption with the teams: Embed with squads and their AI DRIs, find where the pipeline breaks on real work, fix the system rather than the single output, and turn what works into paved paths, skills, templates and docs other engineers can extend.
- Partner cross-functionally: Work with platform, developer productivity, security and privacy, AI infrastructure, mobile and backend squads, product and design, and engineering leadership to make trade-offs explicit and keep everyone moving on one system instead of five parallel ones.
Requirements
We'd love to hear from you if you are:
- An experienced builder: 6+ years building and operating production systems that other engineers depend on, including developer tooling, internal platforms, or AI infrastructure at scale. We weigh demonstrated outcomes over years.
- Proven with agentic loops in production: You have built and operated agentic coding workflows or autonomous loops in a real engineering organization, beyond demos: background agents producing PRs, automated review, CI repair, test generation, or similar, with adoption and measured results.
- A whole-lifecycle thinker: You reason about specification, review, testing, CI/CD, release and operations as one system, and you know where the bottleneck moves when code generation gets cheap.
- A technical leader: You set direction across teams you don't manage, write the designs others build on, and are trusted with the hard calls on architecture and risk.
- Strong on fundamentals: mobile domain or backend APIs, concurrency, distributed systems, testing, debugging and reliability. You treat AI output as a draft and can show how you verify it.
- Technically versatile: Fluency in one domain of backend, iOS, or Android, with a stretch into others. You use the tools available to work across platforms and pick up new stacks quickly.
- Security and privacy conscious: You understand the responsibility of handling sensitive personal data and of giving agents access to real systems, and you design for both from the start.
- High agency: You thrive in ambiguity and shape the requirements yourself through experimentation.
- Collaborative and resilient: You bring teams along, take feedback from engineers who are skeptical, share credit, and keep going when experiments fail or the tooling changes under you. You communicate clearly with engineers, managers and non-engineering partners.
Nice to Haves
You don't need all of these, but they're nice signals of fit:
- Experience with coding agents at depth: skills, MCP servers, hooks, sub-agent orchestration, headless runs.
- Built evaluation harnesses or benchmarks for coding agents, or LLM-as-judge grading tied to build and test outcomes.
- Experience with sandboxed execution at scale: ephemeral dev environments, VM or container fleets, macOS build infrastructure.
- Background in developer productivity measurement (DORA, SPACE, DX Core 4) and in turning metrics into decisions without turning them into targets.
- Shipped to mobile apps or other environments with slow, expensive feedback loops.
- Experience in digital health, wearables, MedTech, or other privacy-sensitive or regulated products.
- Contributions to open-source AI projects, or a portfolio of projects built on the latest agent capabilities.
- Mentored engineers or led an engineering community of practice.
Benefits
At Ōura, we care about you and your well-being. Everyone here at Ōura has a ring of their own and we are continually looking to improve employee health.
What we offer:
- Competitive salary and equity packages
- Health, dental, vision insurance, and mental health resources
- An Ōura Ring of your own plus employee discounts for friends & family
- 20 days of paid time off plus 13 paid holidays plus 8 days of flexible wellness time off
- Paid sick leave and parental leave
Ōura takes a market-based approach to pay, which may vary depending on your location. US locations are categorized into tiers based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. While most offers will be closer to the starting range, successful candidates' pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, internal peer equity, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future.
Region 1 $198,050 - $233,000
Region 2 $180,200 - $212,000
Region 3 $169,150 - $199,000
A recruiter can determine your Region based on your US location.
We are not considering candidates residing in the following states: Alaska (AK), Delaware (DE), Iowa (IA), Mississippi (MS), Nebraska (NE), South Dakota (SD), West Virginia (WV), and Wisconsin (WI).
Oura is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Individuals seeking employment at Oura are considered without regard to age, ancestry, color, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, protected family care or medical leave status, race, religion (including beliefs and practices or the absence thereof), sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. We will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics.
We will work to ensure individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.
Disclaimer: Beware of fake job offers!
We’ve been alerted to scammers posing as ŌURA recruiters, especially for remote roles. Please note:
- Our jobs are listed only on the ŌURA Careers page and trusted job boards.
- We will never ask for personal information like ID or payment for equipment upfront.
- Official offers are sent through Docusign after a verbal offer, not via text or email.
Stay cautious and protect your personal details.
To all recruitment agencies: Oura does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Oura employees, or any other organization's location. Oura is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
Salary Context
This $169K-$233K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 2239 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 11,520 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At oura, 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 $212,040 based on 13,780 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $230,000. This role's midpoint ($201K) sits 5% below the category median. Disclosed range: $169K to $233K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,480. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,000. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($266,050) and AI Engineering Manager ($253,461). By seniority level: Entry: $112,320; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,830.
oura AI Hiring
oura has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, Data Scientist. Positions span Remote, US, San Francisco, CA, US. Compensation range: $203K - $233K.
Remote Work Context
Remote AI roles pay a median of $188,200 across 2,430 positions. About 6% of all AI roles offer remote work.
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 11,520 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 140 entry-level, 5,630 mid-level, 4,176 senior, and 1,574 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (708 positions). The remaining 10,737 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,480. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,000. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($266,050 median, 70 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($253,461 median, 58 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 476 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 11,520 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (8,769), AI Software Engineer (586), AI Product Manager (511). 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 (140) are outnumbered by mid-level (5,630) and senior (4,176) 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 1,574 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (708 positions), with 10,737 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 $213,480. Top-quartile roles start at $264,000, 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 $266,050 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 (2,267 postings), Aws (1,178 postings), Azure (972 postings), Rag (924 postings), Gcp (715 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (572 postings), Kubernetes (559 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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