Entry Level ML Jobs for Masters?

Question

First a little about me:I am currently in the first year of my master's in computer science at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor with a focus on machine learning. I will be interning this summer at Bloomberg on one of their natural language processing teams to get some machine learning industry experience.  During my undergrad at Oregon State, I was also a computer science major and did a cloud-based internship and an embedded systems internship at a couple of local companies.As I will be applying to full-time jobs in the summer/fall I am currently at a crossroads in deciding whether I want to try to focus on more cloud roles or ML-based roles. Accordingly, I have been looking around to see what kinds of positions are generally available in those areas for people with my background. However, when I look into ML roles that arent the research ones targeted towards Ph.D.'s, they all typically are looking for people who have had a couple of years of non-internship industry experience with ML models and I haven't found many entry-level ones. Thus I was wondering what the typical career paths are for the ML Engineer Roles (or if this is the wrong role what are the correct ones for someone of my background). Any other advice about what these roles generally entail and how people like them would also be great!Thanks!

19g616kybek1k8 · Accepted Answer

I feel this can depend a lot on the company, whether you have any referrals, and/or the culture in the region. In smaller and more agile regions where the demand is significantly bigger than supply in terms of ML people they might be more likely to get you on board if you have something else to contribute to the company right away (e.g. understanding of their domain, ideas about their product ...). Perhaps looking for remote work options might be a way to tap into these regions? For me what has worked the best is personal referrals to get foot in the door. 'Worst case' alternative is to work on slightly different role and transition within a company or then use that industry experience and personal interest in ML to change to ML role.

undertone · Answer

I feel like you're looking for Applied Scientist / Research Scientist roles, not sure if only Masters can get you that title, but those are the ML based roles that I know about

BreathingCode · Answer

I'm pursuing my master's degree in machine learning. To me the most valuable part of the experience was learning the calculus and linear algebra that drive the algorithms, and then implementing the training logic from scratch. Having that under-the-hood knowledge has been invaluable.

If you can find a means to do that I highly recommend it.

Entry Level ML Jobs for Masters?

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