Principal MLOps Engineer

Role Overview

Raft is hiring a Principal MLOps Engineer for a U.S.-based position supporting mission-critical AI and data platforms for the Department of Defense. The role focuses on designing, deploying, and maturing Raft’s end-to-end ML platform and MLOps infrastructure across cloud and constrained environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain secure, scalable MLOps infrastructure and deployment pipelines for production ML systems
• Mature internal ML platform capabilities across the model lifecycle, including:
  • model packaging
  • registry/catalog workflows
  • deployment, monitoring, and operational support
• Deploy and manage ML workloads on Kubernetes, including GPU-enabled clusters
• Support model serving and inference infrastructure for multiple ML domains, including:
  • traditional ML
  • computer vision
  • speech/audio
  • LLM-based systems
• Build and maintain CI/CD workflows for ML services, model artifacts, and platform components
• Partner with ML engineers, software engineers, and product teams to move models from experimentation to reliable production
• Improve observability, reliability, security, and maintainability across ML infrastructure and services
• Help evaluate and standardize runtime patterns, serving frameworks, and deployment architectures
• Contribute to infrastructure decisions across edge, on-prem, and cloud environments
• Support compliance-driven and secure software supply chain practices in defense settings
• Provide hands-on customer support in advanced DoD environments

Requirements

• 7+ years hands-on experience in software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, MLOps, or related technical roles
• 5+ years experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production
• 5+ years experience supporting enterprise cloud infrastructure or applications in AWS, Azure, or similar environments

Nice-to-haves

• Strong fit for candidates who understand both:
  • the infrastructure needed to run ML systems in production
  • the practical needs of ML engineers building and deploying models

Location / Eligibility

• Position requires U.S. citizenship
• Work must be conducted within the continental U.S.