Machine Learning Engineers — What Do They Actually Do?

The title is a trick question, of course. Much like Data Scientist before it, the title Machine Learning Engineer is developing into a trend in the job market for people in our profession, but there is no consensus about the meaning of the title or the functions and skills it should encompass. I imagine new entrants into the job market in DS/ML find this maddening to decipher. (Even experienced people do!) So, let’s talk about what it might mean depending on who’s doing the talking. As I was discussing this with a friend the other day, I phrased it as MACHINE LEARNING engineer or machine learning ENGINEER. Basically, from what I have seen, there are roles and expectations in some camps under the title that either: <ul> <li>A. expect extensive software engineering skills with a dollop of experience or at least familiarity with ML, or</li> <li>B. there are expectations of intensive ML experience, often including deep learning or generative AI, and they would like it if you can write a function when it’s called for.</li> </ul> The former group probably would have just been “Software Engineers” in previous years, while the latter would have fallen comfortably under “Data Scientists” back in the day when I started my career (although generative AI was certainly not part of the game back then). This reflects an interesting pattern in the development of our profession more broadly. We have never been good at breaking up the roles in our field into subcategories that clearly delineate the skill set (or the responsibilities) of the roles. It is a fast moving, constantly changing young field, so this is not shocking! This was always true of the title Data Scientist, which was essentially a delineator for “something more technically skilled than a Data Analyst” for a long time. Some folks referred to Data Scientists as the people who could handle unstructured or disorganized data, and that’s gone away as a defining factor from what I can see. <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/machine-learning-engineers-what-do-they-actually-do-e666081c3181">Learn More</a>