senior-ml-engineer

Senior ML Engineer

Production ML engineering patterns for model deployment, MLOps infrastructure, and LLM integration.

Core Capabilities

• Model deployment — export to ONNX/TorchScript/SavedModel, containerize, canary rollout, and serve via FastAPI, Triton, TF Serving, TorchServe, or Ray Serve with p95<100ms / error<0.1% gates.
• MLOps pipelines — feature stores (Feast/Tecton), experiment tracking (MLflow/W&B), model registry, A/B testing, and drift-triggered retraining.
• LLM integration — provider abstraction, retry/fallback with exponential backoff, token counting, response caching, cost tracking, and Pydantic output validation.
• RAG systems — vector database selection, chunking strategies, ingestion, retrieval, and reranking.
• Model monitoring — latency/error tracking, input drift detection (KS test, PSI), prediction-shift alerts, and automated retraining triggers.

When to Use

• Deploying a trained model to production with canary rollout and monitoring.
• Standing up MLOps infrastructure (feature store, registry, retraining).
• Integrating LLM APIs with provider abstraction and cost control.
• Building a RAG pipeline (vector DB + chunking + retrieval + reranking).
• Setting up drift detection and model-health alerting.

Clarify First

Before generating artifacts, confirm these inputs. If any is unknown or vague, ASK — do not assume:

• [ ] Task — model deployment / RAG pipeline build / monitoring setup (selects the script and workflow)
• [ ] Serving target & rollout — container vs K8s and canary vs direct (drives the generated Dockerfile/manifests and health gates)
• [ ] Model or data interface — the input/output contract, and for RAG the corpus + vector store (shapes the scaffold)

Stop rule: ask only the 2-3 that most change the output. If the user says "just draft it," proceed and list your assumptions at the top of the artifact.

Tools

| Tool | Purpose | Command |

|------|---------|---------|

| model_deployment_pipeline.py | Generate deployment artifacts (Dockerfile, K8s manifests, health checks) | python scripts/model_deployment_pipeline.py --input <path> --output <path> [--config <file>] |

| rag_system_builder.py | Scaffold a RAG pipeline with vector store + retrieval logic | python scripts/rag_system_builder.py --input <path> --output <path> [--config <file>] |

| ml_monitoring_suite.py | Set up drift detection, alerting, and dashboards | python scripts/ml_monitoring_suite.py --input <path> --output <path> [--config <file>] |

All tools support --verbose/-v and emit JSON (status, start_time, end_time, processed_items) to stdout. See [references/tool-reference.md](references/tool-reference.md) for full flag detail.

References

Load the reference that matches the task — keep this file lean and pull detail on demand:

• [references/production-ml-workflows.md](references/production-ml-workflows.md) — the five step-by-step workflows (model deployment, MLOps setup, LLM integration, RAG, monitoring) with all code templates, serving/vector-DB/chunking/cost tables, the troubleshooting matrix, and success criteria. Read when executing any workflow.
• [references/tool-reference.md](references/tool-reference.md) — full flag/parameter tables and output formats for the three scripts. Read when scripting the tools.
• [references/mlops_production_patterns.md](references/mlops_production_patterns.md) — model deployment pipeline with Kubernetes manifests, feature store architecture with Feast examples, model monitoring with drift detection code, A/B testing with traffic splitting, automated retraining with MLflow. Read when building MLOps infra.
• [references/llm_integration_guide.md](references/llm_integration_guide.md) — provider abstraction layer, retry/fallback with tenacity, prompt templates (few-shot, CoT), token optimization with tiktoken, cost calculation and tracking. Read when integrating an LLM.
• [references/rag_system_architecture.md](references/rag_system_architecture.md) — RAG pipeline implementation code, vector database comparison/integration, chunking strategies, embedding model selection, hybrid search and reranking. Read when building a RAG system.

Scope & Limitations

This skill covers:

• End-to-end model deployment pipelines (packaging, containerization, serving, canary rollout)
• MLOps infrastructure setup (feature stores, experiment tracking, model registries, retraining)
• LLM integration patterns (provider abstraction, retries, caching, cost tracking)
• RAG system architecture (vector databases, chunking, retrieval, reranking)

This skill does NOT cover:

• Model training algorithms or hyperparameter tuning (see senior-data-scientist)
• Raw data pipeline construction and ETL orchestration (see senior-data-engineer)
• Prompt engineering techniques, few-shot design, or prompt optimization (see senior-prompt-engineer)
• Image/video model architectures or computer vision inference optimization (see senior-computer-vision)

Integration Points

| Skill | Integration | Data Flow |

|-------|-------------|-----------|

| senior-data-scientist | Receives trained models and evaluation metrics for deployment | Data Scientist exports model artifacts and baseline metrics; ML Engineer packages and deploys |

| senior-data-engineer | Consumes feature pipelines and data quality outputs | Data Engineer builds ETL and feature pipelines; ML Engineer reads from feature store for serving |

| senior-prompt-engineer | Provides LLM serving infrastructure for prompt workflows | Prompt Engineer designs prompts; ML Engineer deploys provider abstraction and manages cost/latency |

| senior-devops | Leverages CI/CD and Kubernetes infrastructure for model serving | DevOps manages cluster and pipelines; ML Engineer defines deployment manifests and health checks |

| senior-computer-vision | Deploys vision models through shared serving infrastructure | CV Engineer trains and exports models; ML Engineer handles Triton/TorchServe deployment and monitoring |

| senior-security | Applies security scanning to model containers and API endpoints | Security reviews container images and endpoint auth; ML Engineer remediates findings before promotion |

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Last Updated: June 2026

Version: 1.1.0