Landing a Machine Learning Engineer Role in 2024

Landing a machine learning engineer role requires relevant industry or academic projects on your resume.

### Landing a Machine Learning Engineer Role in 2024-2025: Key Insights and Strategies
* 💼 To secure a machine learning (ML) engineer position, it's essential to understand the role, which combines **software engineering skills** with experience in **ML products or research**.
* 🧠 An ML engineer can work across various domains, including **computer vision**, **generative AI**, or **traditional ML**, and knowing which area to focus on can **enhance your job application**.
* 🔍 The two main pathways to land an ML engineer role are through an **industry project related to ML** or an **academic project**, which can showcase your **relevant skills to hiring managers**.
* 📚 If you're a master's student, consider engaging with local universities or conducting academic projects that align with **current ML research** to bolster your resume.
* 🛠 Participating in hackathons or collaborating with colleagues on ML-related projects can also provide **valuable experience** and demonstrate your **initiative in the field**.
* 🎓 Completing a master's program with a project option can help you **gain practical experience in ML** without needing a PhD, making you **competitive for these roles**.
* 🍀 While preparation is key, being in the **right place at the right time** can also play a significant role in landing a position, as companies may have **varying demands for ML roles**.
* 📈 Ultimately, having **hands-on projects that directly relate to the job** you're applying for will significantly **improve your chances of being hired** in the competitive field of machine learning.

All right, so you clicked on this video because you want to know how to land a machine learning engineer role in 2024 or 2025, and I'm going to tell you how to do that because I just landed a machine learning engineer role at a top tech company.

And I did not have to do a PhD or some of the advice out there, um, that is currently on the internet. And I had to do so much research to figure out how to get on a team like this or what direction I should take just because of all the advice out there.

So I'm hoping that this can help someone, um, kind of understand what goes through the mind of a hiring manager that is trying to hire for these types of roles and more importantly, who I've seen get hired in these roles and how I basically went about it.

So I think to first understand what you need to land an ML engineer role, you first need to understand what an ML engineer is. What does that even mean in this industry? An ML engineer or a machine learning engineer is someone that has a software engineering background or skill set, but also has some sort of specialty or experience in ML products or ML research, right?

So there's a lot of domains an ML engineer or this software engineer that's working on an ML team would have options for, such as they could be working on a computer vision project. You could be an ML engineer on a gen AI project. You could be working on more traditional ML on the statistics side and just on recommendations in general. Um, there's so many types of ML engineers, and it really comes down to when you're applying for

These roles finding out hey which section of ML am I applying for or which type of team at a company would I like to work for right And that will kind of give you a better idea on how to actually land these roles That's why at a lot of these companies you'll see the

listing as software engineer comma ML AI or like ML at Meta that's very common uh machine learning engineer or software engineer machine learning same thing okay research engineer is also basically the same thing as a machine learning engineer except you're more on the research side and probably working with

research scientists who usually have PhDs and are actually implementing papers doing really heavy math and kind of experimenting and coming up with those ideas because they've been doing a PhD in that section of ML for a while so research engineers or ML engineers might work with research scientists who have

those PhDs um uh depending on what that team at that company is working on Now that you know what an ML engineer is how it's a newer term and how there's a large range of topics how do you actually land an ML engineer role and

the main way you land an ML engineer role that I basically discovered or have consolidated with all my expert writing and also landing the role and seeing friends land the roles as well is you need one of two types of experiences or projects on your resume to get that

interview okay you need either an industry project meaning hey you are already working a software job and you get an ML project right that could be your into that section If I got a gen AI project at a job I'm already working at as a software

engineer or data engineer that's going to let me get the skill set relevant to gen AI as an ML engineer and I can start after a couple years or a year applying to gen AI ML engineer roles right but here's the thing what if you're a master's

student or you're just doing a general software engineering job you don't know what to study or do and that's kind of the position I was in right I could just do some side scikit-learn projects do those random tutorials that everyone is giving information about on the internet but

random tutorials are not going to get you the job random ML courses even intro courses right there's a very famous one by Andrew Ng and that course is very good to get an intro to ML to learn maybe what it's about but if you actually want to land an ML engineering role at a

company doing like some some sort of convolutional neural network on a breast cancer data set and being like oh here's my accuracy and then yeah maybe like I tied it in with this model and putting on on your resume with PyTorch that's

not going to cut it okay what you really need and that I've really noticed is relevant and I've even talked to I guess engineering managers in the ML space at different FAANG companies as well but what you need is one of two things I already said the industry

project the second thing if you're in that pickle that I described is you can do an academic project at a university or try to do some sort of academic project on your own that's the last option but really doing an academic project in general and what do I mean by

that if you want, let's say a job in ML compilers, or I won't say ML compilers, but let's say computer vision. If you download or look at the latest Vision Transformers papers at these conferences, um, such as CVPR and ECCV, or

just reach out to your local university and ask them, 'Hey, these are some cool papers you guys are working on in the computer vision space. Can I contribute? Can I be a research assistant? Can I help?' Or, 'Hey, I'm doing this project. Can I get some credits for it as part of my

Masters or anything related to that? The more academic, the more I guess of an academic approach you take with it, that's one way to do it. Now, you might be like, 'Wait, you just said you don't have to do a PhD or an M. You don't. You can do

this through a Masters. If you do a Masters, such as at Georgia Tech online, there's a project option, not a thesis, a project option where you can just do any project, choose a specific ML project you want to do, get a professor to sign off on it, and all of a sudden

now you have that ML project that's going to be on your resume and relevant to that hiring manager for that specific ML engineer team you're applying to. And I think what I'm trying to get at is you really want to think about this more from the

perspective of a hiring manager. If you're a hiring manager and you are hiring for an ML compiler engineer, right, a very specific type of ML engineer, you know what they might consider valuable is someone that's actually implementing or working with this stuff. Any hiring

A manager wants to hire someone that's doing something very similar to what their team is already doing. That's why an industry project's really good, or an academic project directly relating to it, is really good for the project their team is working on. And so imagine if you

wanted this ML compiler engineer role, so you go and contribute to online ML open-source compilers such as Triton, or you make projects utilizing these formats. I know there's one I think it's called MLIR that's another famous one that a lot of these ML compiler engineer roles

list, and you can just go and start playing with these open-source tools and do a personal project. Maybe look up a paper in that space and try to basically learn about it. And if you can have that project on your resume, that's demonstrating you're learning something

that's directly related to the team, that can get you a very strong foot in the door because there's very few engineers who have very specific types of expertise in these ML topics, right? If I was a hiring manager at Meta, um, hiring for an XR or an AR type role, which by

the way, not an engineering manager, so you can take it with a grain of salt, but my strategy for trying to make them interview me would be, hey, let me do a VR project that's um, related to like computer vision. Do something with vision transformers, maybe take one of the

latest papers that got pushed out and wait, let me just tinker with this model, make a modification. I don't have to go and publish a paper. If you publish a paper, whether working with a local university or not, that's cool too. That's going to be even more important, but you

just need something that's directly mapping from your resume to the project and that's really all you need is either you can do it through the industry project or you can do it through the academic project now my last thing is going to be that if you don't know what

type of ML engineer role you want you're kind of just out there to explore and you enjoy the whole field in general that's great too but I would still encourage you to be putting projects whether through your job you can do this in the form of being

like hey I don't have an ML project right now but is there a hackathon can I do a proof of concept for like this Vision Transformer or this ML concept I find interesting can I just showcase it at a hackathon for 2 days in the company

or is there some MLOps Club at my company that just talks about papers and we make some random proof of concept you can put that stuff on your resume because you're technically doing those projects or that exploration at that company and that can be another way to kind of get industry

experience even if you're not working directly on an industry project you can work with people in your company that are talk to them schedule coffee chats etc. and so when it comes to the academic side right if you want to do a masters and then as part of your Masters do a

thesis or a project on a specific type because you know what specific type of ML you're interested in then you can do that and you could probably drink a mango lassi for every single time I said ML in this video and get diabetes and I know this video

also isn't like the most easy to understand, but I'm going to be putting out more content on how to land an ML engineer role. And honestly, actually, I kind of lied; I might not put out more content on how to land an ML engineer role, but I will be

putting out more content in general. And I just felt like posting a video today, so yeah, I hope this helped someone. And if you have any questions at all about how to land like an ML engineer role at a top tech company, or hey, this is what

I'm doing, what should I be doing for X, Y, and Z, then please leave a comment, and I'll actually respond, even if only like in a span of two years, 10 people see this video, but they're very niche, and they want that response. I I'll like I'll

just straight up respond. Um, and then also one more thing, by the way, is you can lock into these roles if you're a generalist. It's it's kind of stupid to think there isn't luck involved. Now, what luck means to you

that's debatable, but when I say lucky, is I don't mean completely out of your control. What I mean is that some companies at certain times will be opening up more ML roles and will have more positions from more teams opening. And because of that, when you have these

projects, when you have your preparation, when your preparation meets opportunity, you can be lucky. And I think doing the most you possibly can up until that point is very important. And sometimes you might be really lucky where you only did one project, or you just started your Masters

and maybe that just got you through the door and you were interview ready and you remember you need to still have that software engineering skill set whether that means elite coding or system design or actually having experience that's depends on the role but yeah and also here's some really good ML engineering

channels I see right here A B and C I'll link them in the comments below because they have really good advice that I actually thought was practical useful and yeah some of them even don't have a lot of subscribers but the advice they're giving is gold and their background is

gold um so yeah I hope this helped do projects directly related to the roles you're interested in even if it's just to learn it might help you roll across ML roles whatever blah blah blah and yeah I'll see you guys in the next video see

How to Get Machine Learning Interviews in 2025

Haris Hussain

The video aims to explain how to secure a machine learning engineer role.

The speaker emphasizes that a PhD is not necessary.

The speaker will share insights from a hiring manager's perspective.

An ML engineer possesses software engineering skills and ML expertise.

ML engineers work across various domains (computer vision, generative AI, traditional ML).

Job titles often include variations like 'Software Engineer, ML/AI'.

Research engineers are similar but focus more on research and collaboration with PhD researchers.

Essential Experiences for Landing an ML Engineer Role

Either an industry project or an academic project is crucial for the resume.

An industry project involves working on ML tasks within an existing software engineering role.

Generic online tutorials and courses are insufficient for securing a role.

An academic project can involve contributing to university research or independent projects.

A master's project can fulfill the academic project requirement.

Hiring managers prioritize candidates with experience directly related to the team's work.

Contributing to open-source projects in the relevant area is highly beneficial.

The speaker provides an example of a strategic project approach for a specific role.

For generalists, participation in hackathons or internal company projects can build relevant experience.

Proof-of-concept projects showcased at hackathons can be included on the resume.

A master's thesis on a specific ML area can also be a strong asset.

The speaker acknowledges the role of luck (opportunity meeting preparation).

The speaker recommends some helpful ML engineering channels.