Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 1, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 14, 2026.
About AgZen:
AgZen is a fast-growing precision agriculture company headquartered in Somerville, MA, built on MIT research and focused on one problem: making crop spraying more efficient. Our flagship product, RealCoverage, is the world's first system that measures and controls droplet coverage at the leaf level, giving growers real-time visibility into spray performance and cutting chemical and water use by up to 50% without sacrificing yield.
We are a small, technically deep team working at the intersection of fluid mechanics, computer vision, AI, and real agricultural environments. If you want to build technology with measurable impact on how the world grows food, this is the place to do it.
About the Role
We are looking for a sharp, tenacious, and thorough Senior Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) Engineer to join our team. As part of the the perception team, you’ll own the operational layer around of machine learning models. This role will be responsible for the intake and leveraging crop protection data collected from RealCoverage units installed on sprayers all around the world which is then used improve our CV pipeline and Recommendation Engine. This role will be an essential component of AgZen’s measurement focus group. Strong communication, flexibility, teamwork, the desire to take on different responsibilities and own them will all be essential skills for a successful applicant.
This role is located in Somerville, MA (Boston area) with work required to be in-person.
What You'll Do
Own the architecture, execution, and operational excellence of large-scale, cloud-native pipelines for multimodal sensor data ingestion, processing, labeling, and validation.
Champion model traceability by building a clear lineage for every production model. Track what data trained it, what code produced it, what validation it passed, and how it's performing. Evaluate and recommend tooling for versioning, metadata, and model registry
Partner with data scientists to detect data quality issues, detect drift in upstream sources, and ensure features stay fresh and reliable
Track model drift over weeks, flag slow degradation before it crosses a threshold, surface feature freshness problems before they cascade
Build diagnostic tooling to root cause pipeline and recommendation issues quickly. Ensure the right context is logged at each stage, candidates, features, serving context, and building the dashboards to tie it collectively
Own automated gates that block bad deployments and assist in running model issue retrospectives
Work with ML engineers, data engineers, and stakeholders to coordinate on post-deployment metrics, defining what metrics to collect after deployment and why they matter
Build tooling and support non-technical domain experts in understanding perception system performance and identifying opportunities for pipeline improvement
Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams of software engineers, machine learning scientists, product specialists, and researchers to design, build, and maintain robust data pipelines grounded in sound data organization, domain knowledge, and careful analysis
Communicate technical findings, data characteristics, and limitations clearly and effectively to both internal partners and external collaborators
What We're Looking For
Required:
Bachelor’s or graduate degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related field
5+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems, applications, or advanced ML systems-scale distributed systems, applications, or advanced ML systems
Experience with MLOps, data pipelines, and cloud distributed systems
Proficiency in Python for system-level and performance-critical implementation
Experience operating end-to-end data or ML pipelines for reliability, scale, and observability
Communication skills that align collaborators and drive execution across functions
Familiarity with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow)
A record of ownership, accountability, and customer-focused engineering
Proven track record of designing robust frameworks with high-quality, durable APIs
Deep understanding of machine learning algorithms with hands-on application
Expertise in building reliable, high-performance, and cost-efficient systems on modern cloud infrastructure-performance
Robust SQL skills and comfort digging into data distributions, feature health, and model behavior
Preferred:
Experience with the field of agriculture or related fields such as environmental or life sciences
Experience with data science based on real-world physical sensors data
Experience with vision-based ML
Experience creating intuitive data visualization tools that make complex data approachable for non-technical users
Prior experience in developing machine-learning models relevant to biological or crop protection outcomes
Advanced scientific Python (NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn) and hands-on experience with PyTorch and/or TensorFlow, including training and deploying neural networks
Experience operating recommendation systems at scale
What We Offer
The opportunity to make an immediate and visible impact in a fast-growing company
Early-employee equity
401(k) with employer matching at 6 months of employment
6 weeks of PTO per calendar year
12 paid holidays
Medical, Dental and Vision insurance
The salary range for this position is $150,000 - $200,000 depending on skills and qualifications evaluated on a per candidate basis.