Some organizations have started hiring for a new tech job: The Machine Learning Administrator – aka the “ML admin”.
“It’s a new persona, but not a well-known persona,” Debbo Dutta, Nutanix’s Chief AI Officer told The Register at last week’s Next conference.
“The ML admin articulates, designs, plans, executes, and monitors the emergent large language model lifecycle,” Dutta said.
The gig doesn’t apply to the tech used to train models, Dutta said. Instead this new class of admin will need to understand how to size large language models to match them with infrastructure and workloads, and ensure uptime for models.
They’ll also need to be across compliance matters, understand infrastructure well enough to scope it and work with ops teams to build it.
“Our hypothesis is that the IT admin will continue to manage the infrastructure up to the layer of the large language models. That’s the red line for now,” Dutta said.
ML admins will also manage their employer’s corporate accounts with major AI vendors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Doing so is necessary because as application vendors add AI to their products, they’ll assume users have the required large language model in place. The ML admin’s job will be to provision their employer’s AI resources so applications can put them to work.
“Our hope is that very soon ML Admins will be part of IT,” Dutta said. For now they mostly work in business units – yet another example of shadow IT emerging as business units build their own AI apps without IT department approval and hire staff to keep them humming.
ML Admins may need to be grown, not hired.
Dutta said Nutanix currently has a “shadow ML Admin, who is training an It admin how to be an ML Admin.”
That means Nutanix is building out its capability to run and manage AI even as it builds that AI. Or as Dutta put it: “We are building the runway, and the control system, and flying the plane at the same time. It is a little crazy right now.”
But at least it’s a new job related to AI at a time the tech is contributing to layoffs. ®
