Senior ML Software Engineer

Atlanta, GA, US Senior AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

DockerKubernetesMlflowPythonRagSagemaker

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

Ready to take your career global?

Make your mark at one of the biggest names in payments.

We are seeking an experienced Senior ML Software Engineer to join our ML team, with a strong focus on payment optimization. You will be the primary software engineering expert for a product area, working as part of a cross-functional agile team and owning the successful launches and ongoing operations of high-profile products in production.

This is a senior software engineering / MLOps role focused on building and operating production services and platform capabilities, not a model research role. Data science experience is valuable but secondary to production engineering and operational ownership. Your focus will be on driving new feature delivery, maintaining operational excellence, and collaborating on enhancements to our shared ML platform.

In addition to technical expertise, this job requires strong collaboration skills. You will work closely with cross-functional collaborators—including ML research engineers, product managers, and platform engineers—to deliver scalable, reliable, and low-latency ML solutions.

What you’ll own

Software and Service Delivery:

  • Design, implement, and deploy software features, backend services, and APIs that operationalize ML models in production (with a focus on backend, API, and service work, rather than model research).

Technical Ownership and Stewardship:

  • Full technical ownership of existing and new production ML services in your area, ensuring alignment of technical investments with business goals and engineering best practices.
  • End-to-end stewardship of service reliability and performance (SLO-driven).

Contribute to the ML platform:

  • Evolve shared platform tooling and standards to improve developer velocity, reliability, and repeatable delivery across teams.

Operational Excellence:

  • Maintain and improve automated CI/CD pipelines, testing frameworks, and monitoring/logging; own pre-release testing, rollouts, and release coordination.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response, root cause analysis, and remediation for your product area.

Leadership:

  • Provide technical guidance to engineers and data scientists, mentor teammates, and drive continuous improvement and knowledge sharing.

What you’ll bring

  • 5+ years as an software engineer, MLOps Engineer, or similar, with hands-on production experience operating backend services or ML-backed APIs
  • Proven expertise deploying ML models as production services, API design, and service integration
  • Strong Python skills and service/backend engineering experience (ideally in FastAPI/OpenAPI, Flask, Go, or Java)
  • Production experience with containerization and orchestration (ideally Kubernetes – EKS/OpenShift), Docker, and IaC (ideally Terraform or Terraform Cloud)
  • Ownership of CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/alerting, and on-call/incident response
  • Experience monitoring, troubleshooting, optimizing production ML systems (latency, throughput, availability)
  • Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
  • Demonstrated ability to work independently, navigate ambiguity, resolve blockers, and deliver results with a strong sense of urgency

It’s a bonus if you have

  • Experience with MLFlow / model versioning, SageMaker Pipelines, or Databricks
  • Familiarity with real-time, high-volume data products and low-latency data stores (e.g. DynamoDB)
  • Automated testing and validation frameworks for models and services
  • Experience in regulated industries (e.g. PCI, HIPAA, SOC2), large companies, or mature engineering teams
  • Optional familiarity with LLM tooling / RAG

Why Join Us?

  • Impact: Own high-profile ML-backed services that power customer-facing products driving measurable business outcomes
  • Autonomy: Take end-to-end technical ownership of your product area, with the responsibility and freedom to drive robust technical solutions, shape best practices, and deliver results in a fast-paced, supportive environment.
  • Collaboration: Join a cross-functional, high-performing team where your expertise is valued and grow with industry experts across engineering and product.

About the team

Our inclusive and global teams win together every day. We’re proud to have the best minds in the industry, whom you can learn from as you grow your career. The people, the energy, and the connections are unmatched. Come and be part of an ever-evolving company and get dynamic opportunities that transcend borders.

What makes a Globalpayer?

Globalpayers think like a client, act like an owner, and win as one team. We’re curious and innovative – always finding better ways to deliver impact. We empower each other to make decisions, and our passion drives excellence in everything we set out to do.

Does this sound like you? Then you sound like a Globalpayer. Apply now to take your career global.

#LI-AB1

Role Details

Company Worldpay
Title Senior ML Software Engineer
Location Atlanta, GA, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Senior
Salary Not disclosed
Remote No

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 9,653 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Worldpay, 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

Docker (3% of roles) Kubernetes (4% of roles) Mlflow (1% of roles) Python (17% of roles) Rag (7% of roles) Sagemaker (1% of roles)

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 $212,000 based on 11,857 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700.

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.

Worldpay AI Hiring

Worldpay has 2 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Positions span Atlanta, GA, US, London Area, United Kingdom.

Location Context

Across all AI roles, 6% (568 positions) offer remote work, while 9,010 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,878 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,413 roles, $264,500 median); Los Angeles (1,340 roles, $210,000 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 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).

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 9,653 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.

Frequently Asked Questions

Based on 11,857 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $212,000. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
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.
About 6% of the 9,653 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
Worldpay is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI/ML Engineer positions include ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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