BlogAI Economics
AI Economics9 min read

AI Team Composition: The Optimal Ratio of Roles

Most AI teams are over-staffed on ML engineers and under-staffed on ML ops.

By Richard Ewing·

The Optimal AI Team

For a mature AI product: 1 ML researcher per 3 ML engineers per 2 MLOps engineers per 1 data engineer. Most teams invert this — too many researchers, not enough ops.

Cost implications: ML researcher ($200-350K), ML engineer ($180-280K), MLOps ($160-240K), data engineer ($150-220K). The ops roles are cheaper AND more impactful for production AI.

Like this analysis?

Get the weekly engineering economics briefing — one email, every Monday.

Subscribe Free →

More in AI Economics

Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

📊

Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.