ML Engineer - Responsibilities (Senior-Level, 6-8 YOE)
ML Engineer Skill Matrix (Senior-Level, 6-8 YOE)
Skill Area
Core Competency
Key Tools & Platforms
Strategic Responsibility
MLOps & Automation
CI/CD/CT Pipeline Architecture, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Workflow Orchestration
Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Ansible, Airflow, Kubeflow Pipelines, Prefect
Architecting the end-to-end automated ML lifecycle. Defining the standards for how models move from research to production. Mentoring teams on DevOps best practices for ML.
Model Lifecycle Management
Model & Data Versioning Strategy, Experiment Tracking & Management, Model Registry Governance
MLflow, DVC, Pachyderm, Weights & Biases, Comet ML, Vertex AI Model Registry
Establishing and enforcing organization-wide governance for model and data assets to ensure reproducibility, auditability, and compliance. Designing the central model registry.
Production Monitoring & Explainability
Data & Concept Drift Detection, Statistical Performance Monitoring, Anomaly Detection, Model Explainability (SHAP, LIME)
Evidently AI, Fiddler, Arize, Prometheus, Grafana, Custom monitoring scripts
Designing a proactive, comprehensive monitoring strategy that goes beyond simple accuracy metrics to ensure model reliability, fairness, and business alignment. Defining alerting policies and automated response actions.
Scalable Computing & Data Processing
Distributed Data Processing, Distributed Model Training, Container Orchestration, Cloud ML Platforms
Apache Spark, Ray, Horovod, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS SageMaker, Google AI Platform, Azure Machine Learning
Designing cost-effective, scalable, and resilient infrastructure for both training and serving large-scale models. Making build-vs-buy decisions on ML platform components.
Core ML & Statistical Rigor
Advanced ML Algorithms, Statistical Hypothesis Testing, A/B Testing for Model Comparison, Causal Inference Concepts
Scikit-learn, Statsmodels, XGBoost, Python (NumPy, SciPy)
Guiding the model validation strategy for the entire team. Designing and analyzing rigorous online experiments (A/B tests) to scientifically prove the business impact of new models before full rollout.
Leadership & Mentorship
Technical Leadership, Project Management, Cross-functional Partnership, Mentoring Junior Engineers
N/A
Setting technical direction for a team, driving consensus on architectural decisions, and successfully partnering with data science, product, and business teams. Growing the skills of the ML engineering team.

Keyskills: AI Developer AI-ML Ai Algorithms Artificial Intelligence Ai Solutions