I just started as a ML Engineer at a non-FAANG company after masters in DS with 140k pay. Now I received another offer as a Data Scientist at Amazon focused on ML modeling and econometrics (~230k). As far as roles are concerned, is MLE better than Data Scientist in the long term future? Can Data Scientists move to ML Engineer or Applied Scientist roles with in Amazon. Will they have to start from scratch? Overall experience: 10 years Current TC: 140k Data Science/ML: ~3 years I went back to school after 9-10 years of industry experience to improve my skills and explore ML space. I do have a couple of years as a Software developer, but moved to analyst and QA roles eventually. Now I want to stay on the technical side in a FAANGMULA company and do Machine Learning. While I managed to get into ML engineer role in a non-FAANG company, I am still preparing to crack interviews with FAANG for similar roles . I am working on LC and still trying to get my hands on system design. Now is moving to Data Science in FAANG a better option or not? I do not work at Microsoft. Posting it from friends account. —————— At the moment, I have been able to crack DS interviews, but coming from a non-CS background, it’s going to take me some time to prepare and be able crack FAANG ML interviews, but I hope to do that one day
Stay on ML path unless the money is too good to turn down for AMZN DS. It’s possible to internally switch to AS/MLE but the difficulty of doing so may vary across teams.
Why leave MLE position? It’s quite hard to get one. So don’t give up easily for a simple product data scientist role.
But don’t MLE make more income than product DS?
Yeah in FAANG but OP is saying they are an MLE in non-FAANG
Maybe ask Amazon to interview you for MLE/AS role instead of DS if the role is not in your desired scope of work
I am still not prepared for ML/AS interviews. I have been doing some leetcode, but I have a long way to go before I am ready to give interviews. Also, I am fine with DS roles as long as I get to work on ML.
What is your current role focused on? Is it a lot of dev ops and deployment of ML or the actual building and training of ML models?
Better go to Amazon for the DS and be preparing to cross to MLE within Amazon. Moving teams within amazon is easy
What's your interest? DS Analytics has enough scope and given the TC difference you can choose Amazon.
I am looking for data and applied scientist’s kind of roles where there’s machine learning and coding.. for L4 AS, I need to be able to clear SWE1 bar. That’s what I am looking for.. I am not great at OOP design, but learning and improving on it.. I am looking at roles where I can do more than SQL and dashboard… I am looking at doing some modeling, forecasting and ML (at least supervised and unsupervised)
Then I would suggest take the role with modeling even if it's lower TC. To be honest I'm surprised there's absolutely no modeling for DS role at Amazon, most of them do some kind of business specific modeling which is not very complex but solves important business questions
Honestly ML is hard and it can be difficult to compete with PhDs who usually make up most of the AS roles from my experience…so keep that in mind before considering that vs MLE, etc
MLE in the long term might make you more burned out
Why ?
It’s more of like training models and deploying it. A mix of DS and MLOps.
OP, what DS masters program did you go to?
Machine learning engineers at Amazon are software engineers. So, your data structures and algorithm's, logical and maintainable, and problem solving coding ability with OOP better be epic. In addition to that, you have to have deep science problem solving skills and solid machine learning breadth. That's what an MLE is here. Data science is more on the scripting side lol...
Wait, you're at Microsoft right? At an ML role? Why would you give it up? For FAANG label? Microsoft is just as good as amazon, so keep doing ML there and interview at companies for ML roles only, don't waste your time interviewing for DS roles if not interested in that direction
Man stick to msft MLE. Amzn DS is average at best
I work at non-FAANG company and not Microsoft