I'm seeking advice from other SWEs who have successfully made the transition into ML Research. Is a MS/PhD required? Or is industry experience enough? A little bit of background, I have close to 2 YoE in AWS as an SDE working on ML Infra but was recently laid off. I'm comfortable working in SWE/ML Ops, but working in ML ops made me realize that I really have a passion for the modeling and algorithms side of ML, which I barely touched in my previous role. I've also been self studying ML by reading papers, implementing my own neural networks for side projects, and watching Andrej Karpathy's videos on training neural networks from scratch, which explains everything very clearly and really reinvigorated my passion for ML research. Is there any good way to pursue research opportunities in this field without going to grad school, or is grad school necessary? I didn't have a particularly high GPA in undergrad, and haven't kept in touch with my professors since college (which I definitely regret), which makes me think that I won't be qualified for a top CS grad program :(. Is my best bet to continue self studying and keep pursuing ML Infra opportunities with the possibility to transition into ML research? Any advice? #amazon #openai #meta #google #apple #netflix #research #ai #ml
Actual research (ie Research Scientist) requires a PhD 99% of the time unless you have insane public presence.
If you're trying to do basic/fundamental research in ML you'll need a PhD to be taken seriously. If you just want to apply existing techniques (which is still very interesting and well compensated) then an MS is fine, but you'll probably want to get an MS in computer science, math, or statistics (or even other fields that make use of statistical techniques like quantitative psychology, computational linguistics, etc.). I would recommend avoiding the Data Science MS programs since they will not be as rigorous.
Also it's fine if you don't go to a top program. As long as you're not trying to get an academic job then any decent program is good enough.
Join a very small company that's run by people with PhDs who looking to hire some software infra people. Express interest in eventually getting into research in the interviews, and see if they respond positively. I know a couple of people whom this worked for.
You can start by posting your tc
lol I was laid off so current TC is 0