Principal Machine Learning Operations Engineer

About Definitive Healthcare: 

At Definitive Healthcare, our mission is simple: to connect with the real people who make healthcare happen. With real data on real people, our customers get the Definitive picture of the Healthcare market to move their businesses and organizations forward.  

We’re committed to delivering the industry’s most reliable, actionable, and differentiated insights and empowering the innovators and organizations transforming healthcare. Because when our customers succeed, healthcare improves—for everyone.  

Since our founding in 2011, we’ve grown into a global company headquartered just outside Boston, Massachusetts, supporting more than 2,100 customers around the world. Along the way, we’ve built a culture centered on purposeful work, collaboration, curiosity, and meaningful impact. 

We’re passionate about the work we do and the people we do it with. Through programs like Definitive Cares and our employee-led affinity groups, we create opportunities for our teams to connect and give back to the communities where we live and work.  

About the Role

We are seeking a hands-on Principal MLOps Engineer & Functional Lead to architect, build, and scale our next-generation Machine Learning and Generative AI infrastructure. In this role, you will design a unified, automated, and secure AI ecosystem capable of training and deploying both traditional predictive models and advanced Generative/Agentic AI systems at enterprise scale.

As the Functional Lead, you will drive engineering excellence, establish MLOps best practices across the organization, mentor senior engineers, and translate strategic business objectives into robust, highly scalable automated pipelines.

What You’ll Do 

• Design, implement, and maintain scalable, robust ML pipelines and data pipelines for CI/CD, and ML model deployments.
• Architect and govern the enterprise feature store and vector store infrastructure to support low-latency feature retrieval for both traditional ML and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications.
• Build and manage enterprise-grade workflow orchestration layers to schedule, monitor, and manage complex, multi-stage model training and data processing dependencies.
• Be a subject matter expert for Generative AI infrastructure, building scalable frameworks to support advanced LLM applications, RAG pipelines, and multi-agent Agentic AI workflows.
• Establish highly efficient environments for model training and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of open-source and proprietary models.
• Optimize high-throughput, low-latency model inference pipelines, utilizing advanced caching and compute distribution techniques to handle large-scale concurrent requests.
• Establish and enforce lifecycle management policies utilizing an enterprise model registry to manage version control, lineage, and tracking from experimentation to production.
• Architect high-performing, cost-efficient infrastructure utilizing autoscaling groups on AWS to dynamically handle varying training and inference workloads.
• Implement comprehensive, real-time endpoint monitoring systems to track model performance, data drift, latency, and system health metrics.
• Serve as the functional lead for ML engineering, defining coding standards, architectural blueprints, framework selections, and operational SLAs.
• Provide technical guidance, code reviews, and mentorship to senior machine learning and data engineers, fostering an agile culture of innovation, automation, and continuous improvement.

What You'll Bring

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a closely related quantitative engineering discipline.
• 12+ years of professional experience in data engineering, ML engineering with a minimum of 5 years dedicated to building, scaling, and managing MLOps platforms in production.
• Deep, hands-on production experience architecting with in Databricks and native Aws environments.
• Expert proficiency in Python, with strong production experience deploying models built in TensorFlow and PyTorch.

Compensation and Benefits

The salary range for this position is $158,000 – $294,000 per year, which represents the base pay the company reasonably and in good faith expects to pay for this role. Actual pay within this range will be determined based on factors such as relevant experience, skills, and qualifications. 

Depending on the position, employees may also be eligible to participate in a company bonus or commission plan. All employees are eligible for a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, flexible paid time off, and participation in the company’s 401(k) plan with employer contribution.

Why we love Definitive Healthcare, and why you will too! 

At Definitive Healthcare, our values shape how we work, how we treat one another, and how we deliver for our customers. 

• We’re obsessed with data. Great companies are built on data customers can rely on. As responsible stewards, we validate rigorously, question assumptions, and use data to make better decisions. 

• We’re accountable. We take ownership of results, not just tasks. When something needs doing, we step up. When things break, we fix them. We follow things through until the job is done.  

• We care deeply. About our teammates, our customers, and the impact of what we build. We assume good intent, communicate openly, and support each other through challenges. We always bring maximum energy to everything we do.  

We're also committed to creating an environment where our people feel supported in their work, their wellbeing, and their financial future.  

• We invest in our people. We offer a competitive benefits package, including comprehensive healthcare benefits and a 401(k) match.  

• We make room for connection and impact. Definitive Cares is our 100% employee-driven program that creates opportunities to connect with colleagues through affinity groups and make a positive impact on our communities.  

• We’re a great place to work. In 2024 and 2025, we earned multiple workplace honors, including Built In’s 100 Best Places to Work in Boston (both years), a Stevie Bronze Award for Great Employers, and recognition as a Great Place to Work in India. 

 What our Employees are saying about us on Glassdoor:  

 “Great Work atmosphere, great work life balance, excellent company to work for, amazing top notch product, incredible customer service, lots of tools to help you succeed.” 

-Business Development Manager 

“Great team. Amazing growth. Employees are treated very well.” 

-Research Analyst 

“I have waited 36 years to work at a dream job for a dream company, and I am so happy to have finally got there.” 

-Profile Analyst

If you don’t fit all of these qualifications, but believe you’re still a great fit, feel free to apply and tell us why in your cover letter.

If you are a California, Colorado, New York City or Washington resident and this role is a remote role, you can receive additional information about the compensation and benefits for this role, which we will provide upon request.

Definitive Hiring Philosophy

Definitive Healthcare is an equal opportunity employer that celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive workplace with equal opportunity for all applicants and teammates. Our goal is to recruit the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool regardless of race, color, religion, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other status. If you’re interested in working in a fast growing, exciting working environment – we encourage you to apply!