In AI groups like google brain, fair - what do these things really stand for? I understand research scientist is a complete phd job. How about research engineer and software engineer? I want to break into ML, work on some practical ML problems applications. Should I look for applying at these teams? Or regular teams? Please suggest. Yoe:2.5, tc:130k.
What do you mean their job is to write code? Then what does a research scientist do? Doesn't everyone write code?
Meaning that the engineers focus on building pipelines, frameworks, simulations, or productionizing models, whereas the more research-y jobs focus more on prototyping and building models.
Problem solve, read papers, review papers, write papers, give talks, do math, analysis, talk to other groups...
At Brain the line is very fuzzy. Research engineers are supposed to write code, but end up doing research and writing papers very very frequently. This is not the case at fair and deepmind, where research engineers’ job is to write code mostly.
Why the fuzziness?
It’s a good thing. Brain leadership rightfully thinks that these lines are made up, and anyone who feels they can contribute should try. The results seem to suggest they’re right.