ML Engineer
A software engineer specialised in deploying and operating ML systems in production.
What is ML Engineer?
An ML Engineer's job is to take a Data Scientist's notebook and turn it into a reliable production system. They handle deployment (APIs, batch jobs), monitoring (drift, latency, cost), retraining pipelines, A/B test infrastructure, and the cloud architecture underneath.
The skill mix: software engineering (~60%), ML knowledge (~30%), cloud + DevOps (~10%). Most ML Engineers come from a software engineering background and add ML, rather than the reverse. Strong Python is baseline; Go / Rust / C++ are increasingly common at performance-critical companies.
Salary in India 2026: ₹10–22 LPA at entry, ₹24–40 LPA at senior, ₹50–80+ LPA at staff. Top employers: Razorpay, CRED, Swiggy, Flipkart, Microsoft India, Google India.
ML Engineer roles have grown faster than any other ML title in India. The gap between Data Scientists and production is exactly where ML Engineers live.
An ML Engineer at Swiggy owns the recommendation system serving 500M+ requests per day. The job is 70% performance optimisation and 30% experimentation — not training new models, but making the existing ones run faster and cheaper.
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