senior-ml-engineer

Senior ML Engineer

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

Table of Contents

• Model Deployment Workflow
• MLOps Pipeline Setup
• LLM Integration Workflow
• RAG System Implementation
• Model Monitoring
• Reference Documentation
• Tools

Model Deployment Workflow

Deploy a trained model to production with monitoring:

1. Export model to standardized format (ONNX, TorchScript, SavedModel)
2. Package model with dependencies in Docker container
3. Deploy to staging environment
4. Run integration tests against staging
5. Deploy canary (5% traffic) to production
6. Monitor latency and error rates for 1 hour
7. Promote to full production if metrics pass
8. Validation: p95 latency < 100ms, error rate < 0.1%

Container Template

FROM python:3.11-slim
 
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
 
COPY model/ /app/model/
COPY src/ /app/src/
 
HEALTHCHECK

Serving Options

MLOps Pipeline Setup

Establish automated training and deployment:

1. Configure feature store (Feast, Tecton) for training data
2. Set up experiment tracking (MLflow, Weights & Biases)
3. Create training pipeline with hyperparameter logging
4. Register model in model registry with version metadata
5. Configure staging deployment triggered by registry events
6. Set up A/B testing infrastructure for model comparison
7. Enable drift monitoring with alerting
8. Validation: New models automatically evaluated against baseline

Feature Store Pattern

Retraining Triggers

LLM Integration Workflow

Integrate LLM APIs into production applications:

1. Create provider abstraction layer for vendor flexibility
2. Implement retry logic with exponential backoff
3. Configure fallback to secondary provider
4. Set up token counting and context truncation
5. Add response caching for repeated queries
6. Implement cost tracking per request
7. Add structured output validation with Pydantic
8. Validation: Response parses correctly, cost within budget

Provider Abstraction

Cost Management

Do not hardcode prices, and do not trust a price table you find in a document (including this one). Providers reprice several times a year, and a stale figure produces a confidently wrong business case.

Work in tiers and look the current numbers up at request time:

Read the live rate from your provider's pricing page and pass it in, the way engineering-team/skills/senior-prompt-engineer/scripts/prompt_optimizer.py takes --price-per-mtok. The ratios between tiers are far more stable than the absolute prices, so build the model-routing decision on the ratio.

RAG System Implementation

Build retrieval-augmented generation pipeline:

1. Choose vector database (Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate)
2. Select embedding model based on quality/cost tradeoff
3. Implement document chunking strategy
4. Create ingestion pipeline with metadata extraction
5. Build retrieval with query embedding
6. Add reranking for relevance improvement
7. Format context and send to LLM
8. Validation: Response references retrieved context, no hallucinations

Vector Database Selection

Chunking Strategies

Model Monitoring

Monitor production models for drift and degradation:

1. Set up latency tracking (p50, p95, p99)
2. Configure error rate alerting
3. Implement input data drift detection
4. Track prediction distribution shifts
5. Log ground truth when available
6. Compare model versions with A/B metrics
7. Set up automated retraining triggers
8. Validation: Alerts fire before user-visible degradation

Drift Detection

Alert Thresholds

Reference Documentation

MLOps Production Patterns

references/mlops_production_patterns.md contains:

• Model deployment pipeline with Kubernetes manifests
• Feature store architecture with Feast examples
• Model monitoring with drift detection code
• A/B testing infrastructure with traffic splitting
• Automated retraining pipeline with MLflow

LLM Integration Guide

references/llm_integration_guide.md contains:

• Provider abstraction layer pattern
• Retry and fallback strategies with tenacity
• Prompt engineering templates (few-shot, CoT)
• Token optimization with tiktoken
• Cost calculation and tracking

RAG System Architecture

references/rag_system_architecture.md contains:

• RAG pipeline implementation with code
• Vector database comparison and integration
• Chunking strategies (fixed, semantic, recursive)
• Embedding model selection guide
• Hybrid search and reranking patterns

Tools

Model Deployment Pipeline

Generates deployment artifacts: Dockerfile, Kubernetes manifests, health checks.

RAG System Builder

Scaffolds RAG pipeline with vector store integration and retrieval logic.

ML Monitoring Suite

Sets up drift detection, alerting, and performance dashboards.

Tech Stack