MLOps Team Staffing Cost 2027 Calculator
MLOps team 2027 cost: Senior ML Engineer $220K + Data Engineer $180K + MLOps/Infrastructure $200K + AI Security $230K. Plus 1.4x burden (benefits + equity + overhead) = $1.1M/year typical 5-person team. Scale to 15+ for enterprise.
Team Composition 2027
Production ML team needs 4-7 roles: ML Engineer (model), Data Engineer (pipelines), MLOps (infra/deploy), AI Security (red team/eval), Product/PM (rare in early teams).
Salary by Location
SF/NYC senior: $250-300K base. Remote US: $200-240K. Bangalore/Hyderabad: $40-80K. Eastern Europe: $80-120K. EU (London/Berlin): $150-200K.
Hidden Costs
Compute: $50K-500K/month. Tools (Weights & Biases, MLflow, Kubeflow): $20-80K/year. Monitoring (Datadog, Grafana): $10-40K/year. Annotation labor: variable.
Source and Disclaimer
levels.fyi 2026, AI compensation reports. Salary data US-centric — adjust for geography. Verify with current market comps.
Source: levels.fyi, mlops community reports. Last updated: May 2026.