Staff ML/LLM Ops Engineer

ABOUT THIS ROLE

We are seeking a Staff ML/LLM Ops Engineer to own the model lifecycle as infrastructure that turns the path from research to production into standardized self-serve tooling. The model portfolio this platform serves spans both the computer-vision models in production today and a growing set of LLM, VLM, and agentic workloads. Bringing those generative workloads under the same lifecycle discipline: serving, version-pinning, evaluation, guardrails, and cost and latency monitoring is a part of this role's scope.

This is a senior individual-contributor and technical-leadership role. You will partner closely with AI/ML research, the application backend team, and platform and infrastructure teams. You should be equally comfortable discussing model-serving architectures, CI/CD and rollback design, polyglot service contracts, and production observability.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

• MLOps: Own the model lifecycle end to end: standardized packaging, a model CI/CD path, a serving layer with stable, versioned contracts, automated deployment and rollback, and monitoring and drift detection.
• LLMOps: Bring LLM, VLM, and agentic workloads under the same platform discipline as the vision models serving with models and prompts version-pinned as deployable, rollback-able artifacts; generative evaluation and regression suites that don't reduce to precision/recall; production guardrails such as input/output filtering and jailbreak and refusal monitoring; and token-level cost and latency observability. Where retrieval or agent orchestration is in play, own the operational seams (vector stores, request tracing) the same way.
• CI/CD: Make the path from research to production self-serve and safe by encoding the security, observability, and on-call guardrails engineers enforce by hand today, so model owners can ship without lowering the operational bar.
• API Boundary Ownership: Define and own the contract boundary between the model platform and the application backend so engineers integrate against deployed models independently.
• Technical Mentorship: Set technical standards and mentor IC productionization work toward the platform, growing the function as the team forms.

OUR IDEAL CANDIDATE

• MLOps & Platform Experience: 8+ years of engineering experience with deep ML-infrastructure / MLOps work, including building and operating a model deployment, serving, and monitoring platform in production.
• LLM Ops: Hands-on experience operating LLM or VLM workloads in production including model serving or managed-provider integration, prompt and version management, generative evaluation, guardrails, and token cost and latency control.
• Self-Serve ML Deployment: Experience designing self-serve ML deployment for other teams, including model registry and packaging, CI/CD for models, serving contracts, rollback, and drift/quality monitoring.
• API Design: Strong systems and API design judgment across a polyglot boundary with the operational maturity to own security, observability, and on-call trade-offs.
• Technical Leadership: A track record of setting technical direction and leveling up engineers (technical leadership; formal management not required).
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Computer Vision / video model inference at scale (GPU serving, latency and cost optimization).
• Cloud-native infrastructure (Kubernetes, Argo, or a comparable deployment stack).
• Experience standing up an ML platform from zero on a team that did not have one.
• Experience deploying AI models to edge environments (e.g. NVIDIA Jetson or similar).
• Agentic and generative tooling: LangGraph, MCP frameworks, vector databases, and inference/serving platforms.

COMPENSATION

The beginning annual salary range for this role is $213,300 - $272,000 USD and is determined by location, job-related experience, and education/training. Your total earning potential is amplified by a bonus structure tied to meeting goals, and you will become an owner from day one through our employee equity program.

BENEFITS

We believe you do your best work when your whole life is supported. We invest in our crew’s health, families, and financial futures with a benefits package designed to support you inside and outside the office. Full-time benefits include, but not limited to: Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits (401k match up to 4%), and flexible PTO.

LVT IS PROUD TO BE AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. All candidates must pass a drug screening and background check upon employment. Some roles may also require passing a federal background check and fingerprinting. Must be authorized to work in the U.S. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, and/or to perform essential job functions, please reach out to your recruiter.