Machine Learning Operations Engineer

Associated Press•New York, NY

7d•$125,000 - $155,000

About The Position

The Machine Learning Operations Engineer owns the production lifecycle of machine-learning systems at AP. This role is responsible for deploying, operating, scaling, monitoring, and governing ML workloads so they run reliably, securely, and cost-effectively in production. The Machine Learning Operations Engineer ensures that models and inference pipelines built by ML Engineers can be safely promoted across Dev, QA, and Prod, meet operational SLAs, and evolve without introducing instability or uncontrolled cost. This is an individual contributing production operations role, focused on runtime behavior, infrastructure, and reliability. It will report directly to our Director, Application Operations.

Requirements

5+ years of experience deploying and operating ML inference systems in production.
Strong experience with AWS SageMaker, including pipelines, endpoints, monitoring, and multi-environment deployments.
Expertise deploying ML models using PyTorch and TensorFlow from an operational and serving perspective.
Proven experience with model deployment and orchestration, including containerized inference and autoscaling.
Experience selecting, evaluating, and optimizing compute resources (GPU/CPU) for production ML workloads.
Experience setting up monitoring, evaluation metrics, and A/B testing frameworks for ML systems in production.
Ability to collaborate effectively with ML Engineers, Data Scientists, and platform teams in a shared ownership model.

Nice To Haves

Operational experience supporting ML systems involving Transformer-based NLP models (e.g., BERT-family models), Computer vision models, Ranking and reranking systems.
Familiarity operating systems that use common ML model types such as Convolutional and feed-forward neural networks, Ranking algorithms, Approximate Nearest Neighbor methods (e.g., HNSW).
Experience running ML workloads over large-scale text, image, and video datasets.

Responsibilities

Design, deploy, and operate end-to-end production ML pipelines across Dev, QA, and Prod environments.
Set up and manage AWS SageMaker pipelines, endpoints, and monitoring for large scale inference workloads, including embedding generation, named entity recognition, reranking, and video processing.
Own GPU and CPU infrastructure selection, scaling, and optimization, including instance benchmarking, autoscaling behavior, and load testing.
Deploy, monitor, and operate inference services that support hundreds of thousands of queries per day across text, image, and video pipelines.
Establish standardized ML deployment patterns at AP, including containerization and orchestration strategies, environment isolation (Dev / QA / Prod), and versioned promotion, rollback, and recovery mechanisms.
Implement monitoring, alerting, drift detection, and evaluation metrics for production ML systems, tracking latency, error rates, throughput, and model/data drift.
Enable A/B testing and controlled rollout strategies for ML models in production, in partnership with engineering and product teams.
Partner closely with ML Engineers, Data Scientists, DevOps, and Platform teams to operationalize new models and pipeline improvements, promote systems across environments safely, and ensure deployments meet reliability, scale, and cost targets.
Manage high-throughput I/O and data movement for large collections of media assets (text, images, video), avoiding CPU, network, and storage bottlenecks.
Reduce operational risk by enforcing reproducibility, observability, security, and cost controls across all production ML systems.