Contract: AI Operations Specialist

We're looking for an experienced ML Ops Engineer to join the ML/AI team at Newsela. This team works on projects ranging from classical Machine Learning to AI / Generative pipelines.  This is a hands-on role. You'll work closely with ML/AI, data and site reliability engineers to take models from prototype to production, build robust data pipelines, and keep our services running smoothly as we continue to scale.

• →Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for ML model training, packaging, and deployment across our microservices.
• →Manage containerized services on AWS ECS, optimizing for cost, latency, and availability.
• →Automate infrastructure provisioning and service configuration with Terraform.
• →Work to maintain and scale services that make use of third party LLM providers.
• →Build and improve data pipelines that feed models from BigQuery, S3, and DynamoDB into training and inference workflows.
• →Instrument services with observability tooling (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Langfuse) and establish SLOs for model-serving endpoints.
• →Collaborate with ML engineers to productionize new models using BentoML, FastAPI, and container-based serving.

• 2-3 years in ML Ops supporting ML/AI features, systems and workflows with 3-4 years prior experience in DevOps, CloudOps or SRE.
• Strong proficiency in Python.
• Hands-on experience with Docker containerization and container orchestration.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD for ML workflows in an enterprise production environment.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms — specifically AWS (ECS, ECR, S3, DynamoDB, CloudWatch) and GCP (BigQuery, Vertex AI).
• Experience with LLM integration and observability (OpenAI API, Google GenAI, Langfuse tracing).
• Experience building and maintaining data pipelines for ML training and feature engineering
• Familiarity with ML modeling workflows — training, evaluation, experiment tracking (e.g. MLFlow, Weights & Biases), and model versioning
• Experience monitoring and flagging model drift over time.
• Exposure to NLP/NLU models and frameworks such as Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, or sentence-transformers
• Knowledge of vector databases (LanceDB, FAISS) and embedding-based retrieval systems
• Experience with scaling and maintaining deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch) in production settings
• Familiarity with classical ML libraries (scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM) and model explainability tools (SHAP)
• Working knowledge of ML serving frameworks such as BentoML or similar.
• Comfort working with FastAPI or similar async Python web frameworks.

Please note that given the nature of the contract, this role will not be eligible to participate in company-sponsored benefits

Newsela is a leading education technology company dedicated to meaningful classroom learning for every student. We deliver integrated, AI-powered solutions designed to unlock student engagement, empower teachers, and drive meaningful learning outcomes. Our suite of products supports knowledge and skill development, writing practice, daily instruction, assessment, and data-informed decision-making across K–12 classrooms. Grounded in learning science research, Newsela’s solutions integrate content, assessment, and analytics to help educators track progress, understand student outcomes, and deliver high-impact instruction that supports every learner.

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