Director, MLOps & Production Platform Leadership

Axial Search; United States; On-site; USD 210,000 - 330,000; Full time

Job summary

Axial Search is seeking an experienced MLOps leader to drive strategy, governance, and the deployment lifecycle for AI initiatives across the organization. You will shepherd end-to-end ML deployment, monitoring, and platform reliability while mentoring a growing team of engineers.

You will partner with data science and ML teams to build robust CI/CD, model registries, and observability, balancing cost, performance, and risk as products scale across multiple domains.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in ML engineering, MLOps, or data engineering with lead experience.
• Hands-on deployment pipelines, containers, and orchestration.
• Experience with cross-functional teams and governance.
• Fluency with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP or Azure).
• Strong communication to translate technical constraints for business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end MLOps strategy and roadmap, defining standards for model deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management across the organization.
• Lead and mentor a team of MLOps engineers and platform engineers, setting hiring bar, fostering technical growth, and driving knowledge-sharing across the function.
• Partner with data science and ML engineering teams to design and build CI/CD pipelines, model registries, feature stores, and observability systems that support production workloads.
• Drive infrastructure decisions - cloud platforms, containerization, orchestration tools - balancing cost, performance, and organizational maturity.
• Establish SLOs and monitoring frameworks for model performance and system health; own incident response and postmortem practices.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to embed governance, data privacy, and audit trails into ML workflows.
• Communicate infrastructure roadmap and technical trade-offs to leadership; align MLOps investments with business priorities.

Skills

Leadership

MLOps

Cloud platforms

CI/CD for ML

Data engineering basics

Communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Airflow

Kubeflow

Job description

Axial Search is seeking an experienced MLOps leader to drive strategy, governance, and the deployment lifecycle for AI initiatives across the organization. You will shepherd end-to-end ML deployment, monitoring, and platform reliability while mentoring a growing team of engineers.

You will partner with data science and ML teams to build robust CI/CD, model registries, and observability, balancing cost, performance, and risk as products scale across multiple domains.