I'm setting up interviews with Google for a Research Engineer role I'm currently a SWE with an undergraduate background in AI/ML (top school). Undergrad is fairly meaningless for this, I know, but I'm also self-studying (textbooks, not interview questions) What are the best team(s) to interview with? What teams focus on reinforcement learning?
I assume Berkeley/Stanford? Curious, what kinds of roles do your undergrad friends get at Google Brain, FAIR? Do they get to work on the good stuff or do they do ML infra, etc?
Have friends working in Brain and Google Translate you need to clear your interviews and that will be generic with one round of ML system design maybe. There are enough teams that do from stuff in reinforcement learning to lingustic models for nlp but they look for relevant expereince as everyone wants to join them and the hierarchy underrstandbly is PhD>Masters>Btech, if you have papers or a returning intern it gets easier. In any case its always easier to transfer internally at Google after a year than outside so if you dont get the team you want dont fret
How hard is it to join as SWE in those teams (not Research Scientist)? Requires academia background?
Studying what's in textbook may not qualify as research experience though.
Agreed. I'm not sure what the exact distinction might be for Research Engineer vs ML Engineer. But I'm interested in an AI/ML Engineer role within a more research-centric team (e.g. within Google AI) as opposed to a product team