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About This Role
Role Overview:
You will own the Azure platform behind SimpliGov’s AI\-native delivery model—infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, observability, AI serving, and cost discipline. This is hands\-on production engineering within a FedRAMP\-conscious environment, where security, auditability, and reliability are core responsibilities.
Responsibilities:
- Deploy and operate our Azure platform: AKS, networking, identity, storage, and environments from development through production
- Own infrastructure as code end to end: environments are reproducible, drift is detected, and nothing reaches an environment without platform visibility
- Operate the AI infrastructure layer: self\-hosted observability and evaluation tooling (Langfuse), product telemetry, model gateway and per\-workload routing, and compliant GovCloud inference paths
- Own cloud and AI cost: metering, budgets, unit economics, MACC drawdown strategy, and active remediation; cost is an engineering metric here, not a finance afterthought
- Harden production access and controls: least privilege, secrets management, audit evidence, and a FedRAMP\-conscious security posture
- Partner with AI Operations on the deploy\-and\-release path: Octopus Deploy, environment promotion, progressive rollout, and rollback
- Build platform reliability: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and capacity planning
- Give the microservices decomposition the platform primitives it needs: service infrastructure, scaling patterns, and clean environment boundaries
Qualifications:
- 5\+ years in DevOps, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering in SaaS environments
- Deep Azure experience: AKS, networking, identity (Entra), and monitoring; you have run production Kubernetes
- Infrastructure as code as your default (Terraform, Bicep, or similar), plus strong scripting; you automate before you document
- MLOps experience: deploying and operating LLM or ML systems in production, including model gateways, inference infrastructure, or AI observability stacks
- Demonstrated cost work: you can point to cloud spend you found, explained, and reduced
- Experience in compliance\-heavy environments (FedRAMP, StateRAMP, SOC 2, or similar) is a strong plus
- Comfortable holding production access, with the discipline that implies
Key Competencies
- Treats environment integrity as sacred: no invisible changes, no snowflake servers, no heroics that cannot be audited
- Cost literacy: reads a cloud bill the way an engineer reads a stack trace
- Automates first: your instinct is a pipeline or a policy, not a runbook step
- Thinks in the open: surfaces risk early and documents what you build
- Calm in production incidents; rigorous in the postmortem
What This Role Is NOT
This is not a ticket\-queue operations role and not a NOC seat. If your model of DevOps is executing change requests that other people design, this is not the fit. It is also not a research MLOps role: the AI infrastructure here serves a shipping product for government customers, with the reliability and compliance expectations that implies
How We Work
We run an AI\-native product development lifecycle. Autonomous agents participate in planning, coding, validation, and release; humans own judgment, standards, and direction. Work moves through a Plan\-and\-Review cadence rather than ceremony\-heavy Agile. Two standards are non\-negotiable: you own and can explain everything you ship, no matter what produced it, and you think in the open, surfacing uncertainty early rather than burying it.
What We Offer:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance plans, with significant employer contributions for employees AND dependents (contributions based on base\-level plan; buyup plans available at additional costs)
- Company\-sponsored life/disabilities insurances
- 11 Paid holidays
- Flexible time off
- 401k plan with 4% employer match
- Monthly stipends for wellness and home office expenses
Legal Disclaimers:
*SimpliGov does* *not**sponsor applicants for work visas.*
*The US base salary range for this full\-time position begins at $150,000\.00 \+ bonus \+ benefits. Individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job\-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.*
*SimpliGov participates in the federal government's E\-Verify program, which confirms employment authorization of all newly hired employees and most existing employees through an electronic database maintained by the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. For new hires, the E\-Verify process is completed in conjunction with the Form I\-9 Employment Eligibility Verification on or before the first day of work. It is not used as a screening tool.*
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 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, MLOps Engineer positions make up 1% of the market. At SimpliGov, 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 $203,000 based on 85 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and Research Engineer ($272,100). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.
SimpliGov AI Hiring
SimpliGov has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across MLOps Engineer, AI/ML Engineer. Based in Baltimore, MD, US.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 15% (635 positions) offer remote work, while 3,657 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,650 roles, $220,000 median); San Francisco (1,335 roles, $265,000 median); Los Angeles (708 roles, $214,112 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 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 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 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). 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 (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) 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 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 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 $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. 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 $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. 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 (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 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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