Hiring Machine Learning Engineers Part 1 - Context

Recently, my team decided to hire for a Machine Learning Engineer. Whilst considering the requirements for this role, a relatively new and ill-defined one in the industry, I found myself thinking about its contrast with the Data Scientist - incidentally, the role I continue to identify mostly with.

In the recent past this kind of distinction only made academic sense to me. I will confess to subconsciously thinking that a Machine Learning Engineer is someone who took the fast.ai course and now builds Deep Learning models on GPU’s, claiming out-of-the-world performances, without considering caveats and biases of the underlying datasets.