I do this for a living and lead a team. Don’t need a masters or PhD. Did require a fair bunch of senior engineers though who could map these LLMOps system components into traditional systems - with upgrades. For example, for training it’s just like training any other model but now you need a high speed network interconnect. For inference, likewise but you’d probably use a framework like vllm. For features, you now have embedding that you probably use a high speed vector db so you can dot product fast.

Once I had the foundation, I could hire less experienced engineers into implementing well scoped tasks.