MACHINE LEARNING ENGINEER

Sony
ppxy23

Go to company page Sony

ppxy23
Mar 17, 2019 22 Comments

How do you get hired as ML engineer? What are the things to learn. How do you sell yourself by just learning all new frameworks and all on ML but no actual experience on ML.

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TOP 22 Comments
  • New / R&D
    zorkan

    New R&D

    zorkan
    In my view, the single most important thing for ML Eng is knowing how to optimize the inference phase of ML. Selling yourself in interviews should highlight some knowledge of ML architectures (where the bottlenecks are for different scenarios), and a lot of knowledge on runtime optimization (how would you alleviate the bottlenecks in a specific language).

    As a researcher/staff scientist, I expect ML engineers to take the inference portion of my sloppy Python code and reduce the latency of queries from 1s to below 100ms (we serve models to millions of users per second, so usually the target is even lower than that). This might entail refactoring my code, or writing some new stuff in a different language.

    Ideal candidate would have in depth knowledge of a low level language (C++ or Java), Python, and runtime optimization. Knowing some ML architectures (at the very least; know how the data flows from input to output for conv/recurrent/feed forward neural networks, and approximate nearest neighbors), and an ML framework like tensorflow is a huge bonus.
    Mar 17, 2019 4
    • New / R&D
      zorkan

      New R&D

      zorkan
      Nah. The product was dumb. And I like where I'm at. I just keep the linkedin door open in case something intriguing does come along.
      Mar 17, 2019
    • Axtria
      racers

      Go to company page Axtria

      racers
      @New are you willing to mentor me? I want to move from a DS to an MLE role.
      Oct 8, 2019
  • Oracle
    //:://

    Go to company page Oracle

    //:://
    By not doing all cap title
    Mar 17, 2019 1
  • Microsoft / Data
    rets

    Go to company page Microsoft Data

    rets
    Get a Master's in ML or a PhD in Science.
    Mar 17, 2019 4
    • MathWorks / Data
      fXss35

      Go to company page MathWorks Data

      fXss35
      Yep. This is the best way. Boot camps will generally be insufficient.
      Mar 18, 2019
    • New
      |__/.\__|

      New

      |__/.\__|
      @rets any suggestions on which universities provide ms in ML?
      Nov 16, 2019
  • Amazon
    vdcb40

    Go to company page Amazon

    vdcb40
    Ignore some of these answers - classic gate keeping. You really don’t need to know that much to get started, although it depends on what you want ‘ML engineer’ to mean.

    Learn the basic ‘standard’ state of the art models at a high level to demonstrate curiosity and the ability to learn (reading papers is a necessity in this field, but they tend to be pretty light on hard math). In CV you should know convolutions, resnet and maybe some object detection models like faster rcnn. NLP is maybe language models, transformer and perhaps some RNN I’m not familiar with.

    Learn one of the major frameworks and actually use it. Optional because it’s time consuming, but implementing a real model (i.e. not a regression) will probably help give you something to talk about in interviews.
    Mar 18, 2019 3
    • Amazon
      vdcb40

      Go to company page Amazon

      vdcb40
      You think? I was more trying to counter the idea that you need a masters/PhD or the ability to do complicated math.
      Mar 18, 2019
    • Auth0 / Eng
      Firaxis

      Go to company page Auth0 Eng

      Firaxis
      Well I guess there are different levels of gatekeeping. With something like ML there is going to be a high barrier to entry anyway.
      Mar 18, 2019
  • For real ML you need strong calculus, strong linear algebra, and strong statistics. The level is likely way beyond what you’re used to. Then Andrew Ng and then a couple of higher level courses. Definitely deep learning and unsupervised learning.

    This will tell you if you have the math skills or you need to study

    https://davidrosenberg.github.io/mlcourse/Notes/prereq-questions/math-questions.pdf
    Mar 18, 2019 0