ML Ops Engineer — Agentic AI Lab (Founding Team

ML Ops Engineer — Agentic AI Lab (Founding Team)

Location:

San Francisco Bay Area

Type:
Full-Time

Compensation:
Competitive salary + meaningful equity (founding tier)

Backed by 8VC, we're building a world-class team to tackle one of the industry's most critical infrastructure problems.

Our AI Lab is pioneering the future of intelligent infrastructure through open-source LLMs, agent-native pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and knowledge-graph-grounded models.

We're hiring an ML Ops Engineer to be the glue between ML research and production systems — responsible for automating the model training, deployment, versioning, and observability pipelines that power our agents and AI data fabric.

You'll work across compute orchestration, GPU infrastructure, fine-tuned model lifecycle management, model governance, and security.

• Build and maintain secure, scalable, and automated pipelines for:
• LLM fine-tuning, SFT, LoRA, RLHF, DPO training
• RAG embedding pipelines with dynamic updates
• Model conversion, quantization, and inference rollout
• Manage hybrid compute infrastructure (cloud, on-prem, GPU clusters) for training and inference workloads using Kubernetes, Ray, and Terraform
• Containerize models and agents using Docker, with reproducible builds and CI/CD via Git Hub Actions or ArgoCD
• Implement and enforce model governance: versioning, metadata, lineage, reproducibility, and evaluation capture
• Create and manage evaluation and benchmarking frameworks (e.g. OpenLLM-Evals, RAGAS, Lang Smith)
• Integrate with security and access control layers (OPA, ABAC, Keycloak) to enforce model policies per tenant
• Instrument observability for model latency, token usage, performance metrics, error tracing, and drift detection
• Support deployment of agentic apps with Lang Graph, Lang Chain, and custom inference backends (e.g. vLLM, TGI, Triton)

Model Infrastructure:

• 4+ years in MLOps, ML platform engineering, or infra-focused ML roles
• Deep familiarity with model lifecycle management tools: MLflow, Weights & Biases, DVC, Hugging Face Hub
• Experience with large model deployments (open-source LLMs preferred): LLaMA, Mistral, Falcon, Mixtral
• Comfortable with tuning libraries (Hugging Face Trainer, Deep Speed, FSDP, QLoRA)
• Familiarity with inference serving: vLLM, TGI, Ray Serve, Triton Inference Server

Automation + Infra:

• Proficient with Terraform, Helm, K8s, and container orchestration
• Experience with CI/CD for ML (e.g. Git Hub Actions + model checkpoints)
• Managed hybrid workloads across GPU cloud (Lambda, Modal, Hugging Face Inference, Sagemaker)
• Familiar with cost optimization (spot instance scaling, batch prioritization, model sharding)

Agent + Data Pipeline Support:

Familiarity with Lang Chain, Lang Graph, Llama Index or similar RAG/agent orchestration tools

Built embedding pipelines for multi-source documents (PDF, JSON, CSV, HTML)

Integrated with vector databases (Weaviate, Qdrant, FAISS, Chroma)

Security & Governance:

Implemented model-level RBAC, usage tracking, audit trails

Integrated with API rate limits, tenant billing, and SLA observability

Experience with policy-as-code systems (OPA, Rego) and access layers

Preferred Stack:

• LLM Ops:
  Hugging Face, Deep Speed, MLflow, Weights & Biases, DVC
• Infra:
  Kubernetes (GKE/EKS), Ray, Terraform, Helm, Git Hub Actions, ArgoCD
• Serving: vLLM, TGI, Triton, Ray Serve
• Pipelines:
  Prefect, Airflow, Dagster
• Monitoring:
  Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry, Lang Smith
• Security: OPA (Rego), Keycloak, Vault
• Languages:
  
  Python (primary), Bash, optionally Rust or Go for tooling

Mindset & Culture Fit:

• Builder's mindset with startup autonomy: you automate what slows you down
• Obsessive about reproducibility, observability, and traceability
• Comfortable with a hybrid team of AI researchers, Dev Ops, and backend engineers
• Interested in aligning ML systems to product delivery, not just papers
• Bonus: experience with SOC2, HIPAA, or Gov Cloud-grade model operations

Experience:

• 5+ years as a full stack or backend engineer
• Experience owning and delivering production systems end-to-end
• Prior experience with modern frontend frameworks (React, Next.js)
• Familiarity with building…