Position Overview:
We are looking for an experienced Machine Learning Engineer (5–7 years) to serve as the critical bridge between our Data Engineering and Data Science teams. While our Data Engineers own the core data infrastructure and our Data Scientists develop and validate ML models, the ML Engineer owns the full operationalization layer — turning research prototypes into reliable, monitored, production-grade systems at scale.
ShyftLabs is a growing data product company founded in early 2020 and works primarily with Fortune 500 companies. We deliver digital solutions built to help accelerate the growth of businesses in various industries, by focusing on creating value through innovation.
Own the full ML lifecycle end-to-end — from translating ambiguous business problems into well-defined ML problem formulations, through model development, deployment, monitoring, and retraining — with minimal guidance.
Lead the design and architecture of production-grade ML systems: define service contracts, data contracts, infrastructure patterns, and failure handling strategies; not just implement them.
Build and maintain ML pipelines for batch and real-time use cases using orchestration frameworks such as Apache Airflow, Prefect, or cloud-native equivalents (Cloud Composer, AWS MWAA, Azure Data Factory).
Operationalize models developed by the Data Science team: package, containerize, version, and deploy to scalable serving infrastructure (managed endpoints, Kubernetes, serverless) with latency and cost awareness.
Implement robust MLOps practices: CI/CD for ML, automated model evaluation gates, shadow deployments, canary rollouts, and experiment tracking (MLflow, Weights & Biases, DVC, or equivalent).
Design and manage feature pipelines with strong understanding of train-serve skew, feature freshness, data leakage prevention, and feature store patterns (Feast, Tecton, cloud-native feature stores).
Build model observability systems: monitor input distribution drift, prediction drift, latency (P50/P99), and correlation to business KPIs; define and automate retraining triggers.
Design and deploy LLM-powered systems where applicable — RAG pipelines, prompt versioning, fine-tuning workflows, vector database integration, and LLMOps tooling.
Collaborate with Data Engineers consuming data warehouse datasets and with Data Scientists to understand model requirements; write clear ML design documents, ADRs (Architecture Decision Records), and technical specs.
Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, lead ML code reviews, and raise the engineering bar across the team.
Partner with product and business stakeholders to define success metrics before building and communicate ML system trade-offs in non-technical terms to client leads.