Freelance/Contract - Senior MLOps Engineer (Financial Services)

Role: Senior MLOps Engineer (Financial Services) Project Duration: Initial 6 Months (Extension highly likely) Location: Remote (U.S. based) – occasional onsite in New York or Chicago preferred Start Date: ASAP Language: English Key Responsibilities: • Design, implement, and scale production ML pipelines for high-volume transactional data. • Deploy and monitor models in AWS SageMaker and Kubeflow, ensuring compliance with enterprise security and audit requirements. • Integrate CI/CD workflows, model versioning, and drift detection across multiple teams. • Collaborate with Data Science, Risk, and Engineering stakeholders to productionize ML models for fraud and credit-risk detection. • Ensure model governance, lineage tracking, and explainability align with NIST and SOC2 standards. • Support migration from experimental notebooks to a fully automated MLOps platform. Requirements: • 7+ years of experience in machine learning engineering, DevOps, or data platform roles, with at least 3 years specifically in MLOps or ML platform engineering. • Hands-on experience with MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow, Docker, and Kubernetes. • Strong proficiency with AWS SageMaker (Vertex AI or Azure ML also beneficial). • Proven background in deploying ML models into production environments within regulated industries (Finance, Banking, Payments, or Insurance). • Knowledge of CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar) and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation). • Understanding of model governance, auditability, and compliance frameworks (NIST, SOC2, Model Risk). • Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams.