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.