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About This Role
Location
Boston, MA
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
On-site
Department
Machine Learning & AI Research
Compensation
- $170K – $230K • Offers Equity
The WHOOP compensation philosophy is designed to attract, motivate, and retain exceptional talent by offering competitive base salaries, meaningful equity, and consistent pay practices that reflect our mission and core values.
At WHOOP, we view total compensation as the combination of base salary, equity, and benefits, with equity serving as a key differentiator that aligns our employees with the long-term success of the company and allows every member of our corporate team to own part of WHOOP and share in the company’s long-term growth and success.
The U.S. base salary range for this full-time position is $170,000 - $230,000 Salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within each range, individual pay is based on factors such as job-related skills, experience, performance, and relevant education or training.
In addition to the base salary, the successful candidate will also receive benefits and a generous equity package.
These ranges may be modified in the future to reflect evolving market conditions and organizational needs. While most offers will typically fall toward the starting point of the range, total compensation will depend on the candidate’s specific qualifications, expertise, and alignment with the role’s requirements.
At WHOOP, we’re on a mission to unlock and inspire performance for life. WHOOP empowers members to perform at a higher level through a deeper understanding of their bodies and daily lives. Our wearable technology collects rich physiological data, providing members with actionable insights into their recovery, training, and sleep.
The Health team develops the algorithms and features that expand WHOOP's health sensing capabilities. The work spans women's health, software as a medical device, wellness and longevity, member insights, and emerging health signals. We combine continuous physiological data with clinical research and domain expertise to ship features that are scientifically grounded and useful to millions of members.
As a Staff Applied Machine Learning Scientist on the Health team, you will turn ambiguous clinical and product questions into defensible studies, models, and evaluation plans on WHOOP's longitudinal wearable and member data (physiological signals, behavioral logs, labs and integrations, and related streams). You will set the methodological bar for a Health domain. You will partner with Machine Learning Engineers on the path to production, and with Product, clinical, and Digital Health partners on what the data can and cannot support.
Success in this role requires applied algorithm and statistical craft, the judgment to operate across Health problem types, and Staff-level leadership: launching domain work independently, raising the quality and velocity of the people around you, and making clear prioritization calls under uncertainty.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design, development, and validation of machine learning and statistical methods for Health features, using wearable physiological and behavioral data and related member sources.
- Frame ambiguous health and product questions into well-scoped modeling or study problems, with clear performance criteria, evaluation plans, and honest treatment of uncertainty and failure modes.
- Set the methodological and quality standard for a Health domain: reusable evaluation practices, review expectations, and documentation that others can inherit.
- Develop and refine approaches for time-series, longitudinal, and multimodal data, including data curation, labeling strategy, feature and representation choices, and offline evaluation that holds up under real-world noise, missingness, and population shift.
- Partner with Machine Learning Engineers to translate validated methods into production-ready systems, making modeling choices that account for scalability, reliability, latency, cost, monitoring, and (where relevant) controlled-release constraints.
- Serve as a technical counterpart to Product and Digital Health (clinical science, regulatory, quality): pressure-test performance requirements, study design, and evidence quality, and push back when a claim is not supportable.
- Raise the quality and velocity of the scientists and engineers around you through design reviews, mentorship, and the judgment of when to coach someone else to champion a problem versus taking it yourself.
- Communicate trade-offs, risks, and results clearly to technical, clinical, product, and leadership audiences; prevent misalignment early; drive decisions with evidence and a clear point of view on domain direction.
Qualifications
- Master's or PhD (or equivalent professional experience) in Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, Physiology, or a related quantitative or health-science field.
- 7+ years of professional experience developing algorithms, applied ML models, or statistically rigorous analyses in health, wearables, medical devices, digital health, or a closely related domain.
- Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: setting methodological standards others reuse, influencing multi-team outcomes, mentoring senior ICs, and making prioritization calls under uncertainty. End-to-end project ownership alone is not sufficient.
- Strong foundation in statistics (Bayesian and frequentist) and machine learning for time-series and longitudinal data, with the ability to draw defensible conclusions from observational, noisy, or otherwise messy real-world data.
- Experience with wearable or physiological signals (PPG, IMU, HR/HRV, sleep, activity, temperature, or similar) or a closely related adjacent time-series domain.
- Hands-on experience designing studies or evaluation protocols end-to-end: data curation, metric choice, validation splits, subgroup and failure analysis, and documentation of assumptions and limitations.
- Strong Python skills with reproducible scientific / ML engineering hygiene (clean, reviewable code; comfort with stacks such as NumPy/SciPy/pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch/TensorFlow).
- Clear, high-signal communicator who can move between deeply technical method discussions and cross-functional conversations with Product, clinical partners, and leadership.
This role is based in the WHOOP office located in Boston, MA. The successful candidate must be prepared to relocate if necessary to work out of the Boston, MA office.
Interested in the role, but don’t meet every qualification? We encourage you to still apply! At WHOOP, we believe there is much more to a candidate than what is written on paper, and we value character as much as experience. As we continue to build a diverse and inclusive environment, we encourage anyone who is interested in this role to apply.
WHOOP is an Equal Opportunity Employer and participates in E-verify to determine employment eligibility. It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
Compensation Range: $170K - $230K
Salary Context
This $170K-$230K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 1623 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 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Whoop, 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 $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $229,300. This role's midpoint ($200K) sits 6% below the category median. Disclosed range: $170K to $230K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Whoop AI Hiring
Whoop has 4 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Boston, MA, US. Compensation range: $215K - $260K.
Location Context
AI roles in Boston pay a median of $215,000 across 360 tracked positions.
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 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 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 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). 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 (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) 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 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 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 $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, 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 $256,000 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 (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 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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