Senior MLOps Engineer

About The Institute Of Foundation Models (IFM) The Institute of Foundation Models is a dedicated research lab for building, understanding, deploying, and risk-managing large-scale AI systems. We drive innovation in foundation models and their operationalization, empowering research, education, and industry adoption through scalable infrastructure and real-world applications.

As part of our engineering team, you will operate at the intersection of machine learning and systems design — building the cloud, orchestration, and deployment layers that power the next generation of intelligent applications at MBZUAI. You’ll work alongside world-class AI researchers and engineers to productionize LLMs, voice models, and multimodal systems at scale.

The Role

As a Senior MLOps Engineer , you will design, build, and maintain robust ML(Machine Learning) infrastructure across training, inference, and deployment pipelines. You will take ownership of the model lifecycle — from data ingestion to real-time serving — and ensure our LLM and speech models are deployed efficiently, securely, and reproducibly in Kubernetes-based environments.

This position requires deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS) , Helm , AWS cloud infrastructure , and modern MLOps toolchains (e.g., vLLM , SGLang , OpenWebUI , Weights & Biases , MLflow ). Familiarity with speech/voice AI frameworks like ElevenLabs , Whisper , and RVC is also valuable.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and manage scalable ML infrastructure on AWS using EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, and IAM-based access control
• Build and maintain Kubernetes deployments for LLM and TTS inference using Helm, ArgoCD, and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring
• Implement and optimize model serving pipelines using vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT, or similar frameworks for high-throughput inference
• Develop CI/CD and MLOps automation for data versioning, model validation, and deployment (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or AWS CodePipeline)
• Integrate OpenWebUI, Gradio, or similar UIs for user-facing model demos and internal evaluation tools
• Collaborate with ML researchers to productize models — including TTS (e.g., ElevenLabs API), ASR (Whisper), and LLM-based chat systems
• Ensure observability, cost optimization, and reliability of cloud resources across multiple environments
• Contribute to internal tools for dataset curation, model monitoring, and retraining pipelines
• Maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and Helm charts for reproducibility and governance
• Support real-time multimodal workloads (voice, text, vision) across inference clusters

Academic Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in MLOps, DevOps, or Cloud Infrastructure Engineering for ML systems
• Strong proficiency in Kubernetes, Helm, and container orchestration
• Experience deploying ML models via vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT, or Ray Serve
• Proficiency with AWS services (EKS, EC2, S3, RDS, CloudWatch, IAM)
• Solid experience with Python, Docker, Git, and CI/CD pipelines
• Strong understanding of model lifecycle management, data pipelines, and observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki)
• Excellent collaboration skills with ML researchers and software engineers

Professional Experience – Preferred

• Extensive Experience with vLLM, K8s, Elevenlabs, Whisper, Gradio/OpenWebUI, or custom TTS/ASR model hosting
• Familiarity with multi-GPU scheduling, NCCL optimization, and HPC cluster integration
• Knowledge of security, cost management, and network policy in multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters and cloudflare systems
• Prior work in LLM deployment, fine-tuning pipelines, or foundation model research
• Exposure to data governance and responsible AI operations in research or enterprise settings