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About This Role
Company Description
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Today, when you go to your doctor and get referred to a specialist, your doctor sends out a referral and tells you, “They’ll be in touch soon.” So you wait. And wait. Sometimes days, weeks, or even months. Why? Because too often providers are overwhelmed with the painstakingly tedious work required to get paid by insurance companies. Powered by proprietary models, Tennr handles the complex paperwork that gets patients through the door and providers paid, helping operators get patients the right care, at the right time, in the right setting.
Role Description
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As the first and founding ML Operations Engineer at Tennr, you’ll play a crucial role in building and iterating on foundational Machine Learning and AI systems. You’ll own building machine learning training and inference pipelines that can handle increasing traffic demands and proliferation of product surface as we grow. You will be critical in ensuring our AI\-driven healthcare platform is powered by robust, scalable, and efficiently deployed models.
Our Machine Learning team owns and develops multiple in\-house, proprietary VLMs, LLMs, and other models that are purpose\-built for the ambitious problems we are solving in the healthcare space. This is not a role where you are repackaging and wrapping old innovations, but an opportunity to be on the cutting edge of experimentation and productization of net new capabilities. You’ll make impactful contributions and influence fundamental elements of our ML and data systems, expanding Tennr’s ability to rapidly iterate and solve critical problems for patients and providers.
Responsibilities
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- Architect, design, and implement ML software systems for deploying and managing models at scale.
- Develop and maintain infrastructure that supports efficient ML operations, including data pipelines, model evaluations, deployments, and training at scale.
- Collaborate closely with ML engineers, software engineers, and cross\-functional teams to ensure seamless integration of models with data pipelines and products.
- Troubleshoot production issues and continuously improve systems to enhance performance and efficiency.
- Create tooling for online and offline evaluation of ML \& LLM systems.
Candidate Qualifications
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- 5\+ years of experience in ML model deployment, infrastructure, and scaling in production environments
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, with proficiency in Python and TypeScript
- Experience in software design and architecture for highly available ML systems for use cases like inference, evaluation, and experimentation
- Strong knowledge of observability, including logging, metrics, tracing, model performance monitoring, and alerting
- Experience with distributed systems, reliability, and production incident response
- Comfortable working in ambiguity with high ownership, moving quickly in a fast\-paced startup environment, and proactively driving projects from idea to production
- *Nice to have:*
+ Experience working with ML CI/CD and common ML frameworks like Pytorch, Tensorflow, etc.
+ Experience working with common inference frameworks like vLLM, TensorRT, Triton, etc
+ Experience with GPU orchestration, including managing GPU workloads/scheduling, cost management, cluster utilization, etc
+ Experience with GPU optimization (training/inference) involving CUDA profiling, memory optimization, multi\-GPU communication, etc
Why Tennr?
==============
- Drive Impact: one of our company values is Cowboy, meaning you set the pace. You won’t just talk about things, you’ll get them done. And feel the impact.
- Develop Operational Expertise: learn the inner workings of scaling systems, tools, and infrastructure
- Innovate with Purpose: we’re not just doing this for fun (although we do have a lot of fun). At Tennr, you’ll join a high\-caliber team maniacally focused on reducing patient delays across the U.S. healthcare system.
- Build Relationships: collaborate and connect with like\-minded, driven individuals in our Hudson Square office 4 days/week
- Free lunch! Plus a pantry full of snacks.
Benefits
============
- Beautiful new office at 345 Hudson Street
- Unlimited PTO
- 100% paid employee health benefit options
- Employer funded 401(k) match
- Competitive parental leave
Compensation Range: $190K \- $230K
Salary Context
This $190K-$230K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1937 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 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 69% of the market. At tennr, 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 $181,170 based on 12,692 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $165,000. This role's midpoint ($210K) sits 16% above the category median. Disclosed range: $190K to $230K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.
tennr AI Hiring
tennr has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $230K - $230K.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $211,000 across 2,643 tracked positions. That's 5% above the national 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 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 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 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). 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 (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) 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 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 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 $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. 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 Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 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 (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 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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