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About This Role
PathAI's mission is to improve patient outcomes with AI-powered pathology.
Our platform promises substantial improvements to the accuracy of diagnosis and the efficacy of treatment of diseases like cancer, leveraging modern approaches in machine learning and artificial intelligence. We have a track record of success in deploying AI algorithms for histopathology in translational research, pathology labs and clinical trials. Rigorous science and careful analysis is critical to the success of everything we do. Our team, composed of diverse employees with a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, is passionate about solving challenging problems and making a huge impact on patient outcomes.
We are seeking an Associate Director, MLOps Lead to join our Machine Learning team. In this position, you will lead the team who is responsible for the backbone of our AI/ML Stack. This is a highly visible role as you will oversee the infrastructure that bridges ML research and massive-scale production. Your primary directive is to evolve our stack to meet the next scale of needs in large scale ML training & inference workloads.
The Associate Director MLOps Lead is someone who enjoys designing and building for reliability, relishes collaboration and technical challenges, and takes pride in making things better.. Our technical space is broad: high-scale AI training & inference workloads, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, observability, distributed systems, and a bit of everything in between.
The Opportunity:
This role is critical for driving the scalability and efficiency of our Machine Learning Operations platform with high-impact & high growth strategic initiatives.
- Vision and Roadmap: Develop and execute the long term vision & roadmap for MLOPs team to support ML development and deployment needs across the business units. Successfully manage the tension between short-term tactical deliveries and long-term architectural transformation for future growth.
- Team Management: Lead and mentor a team of 6-7+ high-performing engineers. Strategically allocate resources to manage support for existing services while executing key strategic initiatives.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with leaders across machine learning, data science, product engineering, and infrastructure to proactively identify pain points, address bottlenecks, and facilitate the deployment of new solutions.
- Foundation Model Readiness: Architect the compute and storage pipelines required for ML Engineers to manage millions of slides and complex derived artifacts without data fragmentation or synchronization latency.
- Inference Modernization: Modernize the AI Product inference stack to support 5-10x growth of AI runs across global deployments.
- System Observability: Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to establish comprehensive metrics covering compute under-utilization, network bottlenecks, and granular cost and turn-around-time attribution.
- Technology Refresh: Conduct "Build vs. Buy" assessments, leading "Stack Refresh" audits to benchmark our proprietary tools against best-in-class commercial and open-source alternatives to meet our future needs.
Who You Are: (Required)
- You have a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
- You have 8–10+ years in Software/ML Engineering, with 4+ years managing engineering teams and platform strategy; experience building production-grade frameworks for MLOps or ML Infrastructure.
- You have a proven track record of growing engineering teams, managing team budgets/cloud costs, and driving MLOps platform adoption across multi-disciplinary organization units.
- You have a demonstrated level of deep technical expertise with ML workloads on kubernetes, cloud computing platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), workflow orchestration (Airflow, Kubeflow, or proprietary equivalents) and DevOps principles and infrastructure-as-code (Helm, Terraform).
- You have demonstrated experience managing petabyte-scale datasets and high-throughput production inference pipelines.
- You have demonstrated strong software engineering skills in complex, multi-language systems and experience with scalable service architecture.
- You have experience using AI assistants (e.g. CoPilot, Cursor, Claude) across platform development lifecycles.
Preferred:
- You have experience working with ML frameworks like PyTorch or Scikit-learn.
- You have experience with large-scale data processing frameworks (e.g. Spark, Hive, Databricks, Amazon EMR)
- You have demonstrated expertise in MLOps principles, including model lifecycle management, feature stores, model monitoring, and CI/CD for ML.
- You have a familiarity with security and compliance best practices in ML systems.
This is a hybrid position based in Boston, MA.
Relocation benefits are not available for this position.
The expected salary range for this position based on the primary location Boston, MA is $181,500 - $278,300. Actual pay will be determined based on experience, qualifications, geographic location, and other job-related factors permitted by law.
PathAI is an equal opportunity employer, dedicated to creating a workplace that is free of harassment and discrimination. We base our employment decisions on business needs, job requirements, and qualifications — that's all. We do not discriminate based on race, gender, religion, health, personal beliefs, age, family or parental status, or any other status. We don't tolerate any kind of discrimination or bias, and we are looking for teammates who feel the same way.
Salary Context
This $181K-$278K 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
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 PathAI, 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, 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. Director-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $272,275. This role's midpoint ($229K) sits 12% above the category median. Disclosed range: $181K to $278K.
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.
PathAI AI Hiring
PathAI has 6 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across MLOps Engineer, AI/ML Engineer, AI Product Manager. Positions span Boston, MA, US, Boston, MA. Compensation range: $104K - $278K.
Location Context
AI roles in Boston pay a median of $215,000 across 323 tracked positions.
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.
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