Hey everyone,
I'm a senior ML engineer (~4.5 years exp) working at a medium-sized company. My educational background is a BSc and MSc in computer engineering from a not super fancy university in Europe. I wrote a few papers during my university years and as a result of hobby projects, but these were published in mediocre conferences (so not Neurips/ACL-level).
I tried applying to a few ML engineering jobs in the past couple of months (Spotify, Apple and Amazon) but did not hear back. I searched through Linkedin to see the backgrounds of ML engineers working at these companies in my area just to get an idea of the situation. My impression was that a vast majority of these people went to top-tier universities (significant number of people have a Phd), interned at FAANG during their university years, wrote (or contributed to) papers in top ML conferences etc.
I know that ML engineering positions are very competitive at these companies & also the market is very tough now in general, but it got me wondering:
What should someone like me work on to increase my chances of joining one of these companies as a ML engineer? The patterns I see from people working there is hard to achieve at this stage in my life as:
- I already have a MSc degree and doing another one at a better university does not really make sense
- Since I'm working as a senior engineer, I don't know if applying for internships positions (even if it's FAANG) is a sensible choice
- Writing top-tier papers is incredibly time consuming and hardly possible with maintaining a full time job. To be honest, I tried to do this in the past (since I know publications at top-tier conferences matter a lot in these situations), but it really affected my personal life. This is almost like trying to do two full-time jobs, which messed up my WLB.
Some things I was thinking about focusing on that could help me stand out:
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Writing technical blogposts to our company's engineering blog.
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Apply to meetups or conferences as a speaker.
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Certifications (I was thinking of something like or )
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Focus on promotion to staff/principal MLE. It may be easier to step into a higher tier company by down-leveling.
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Keep trying to do research/writing papers as a side project, but need to figure out how to do this without burning out.
I honestly don't know if the above sound sensible, so I'd love to hear your opinion on this or if you have any additional ideas.
