We are living in a privileged era of technological advancements around us that has made our life easier, comfortable and hassle-free. Most of these technologies that we are not aware of and are taken for granted are powered by Artificial Intelligence.
AI is the vision and science of creating machines and systems that are made capable of emulating humans in performing varied tasks. If the objective of AI is to mimic humans, then ML is the tool to achieve this by training machines to learn and recognize various patterns from data.
Facebook is an obvious example of an ML user. Account-holders of this platform has become aware of the targeted ads that they see based on everything they watch. Even if you search or buy an item on Amazon then you can see an ad for that item on your Facebook.
What is Machine Learning?
It is defined as the technique of creating machines or systems that can analyze historical data and learn its patterns and make appropriate decisions and predictions on similar data tasks with less human intervention.
An analogy can be made between humans and ML. Humans are intelligent creatures that learn from their mistakes and experiences to make better decisions in the future. Similarly, machine learning can be described as a technique of training a computer to learn from pre-existing data and perform tasks for humans in the best manner in the future.
ML uses the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to train the machines using various data and algorithms by building the machine learning models. AI is defined as the science of how machines learn from their environment and increase their knowledge and intelligence as time passes on.
ML reduces human efforts to a great extent and improves the machine’s performance by enabling them to learn by themselves.
Who is a Machine Learning Engineer?
These professionals are some of the most demanded engineers in the IT industry and their demand will rise owing to companies that adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI).
These engineers are at the intersection of software engineers and data scientists as they possess skills from both fields.
A Machine Learning (ML) Engineer is a computer programmer whose job is designing and building self-running software that learns from data it has and does the automation of predictive models. They need to have a good understanding of data structures and data models along with the deployment of those models into usable software.
An ML engineer must understand four basic approaches for creating a machine learning model which are:
- supervised learning,
- unsupervised learning,
- reinforcement learning, and
- deep learning
The main difference between these approaches lies in the data that is used to create an ML model.
Duties of ML Engineer
- Designing of ML systems that involves assessment and organization of data, execution of tests and experiments, monitor and optimize the learning process to help in the development of ML systems.
- Knowledge and application of fundamentals of computer sciences like data structures, algorithms, computer architecture, computability and complexity.
- Define project goals and roadmaps by collaborating with software engineers, product managers, data scientists and researchers.
- Support the above mentioned professionals for applying ML into the company’s products.
- Extraction of useful insights by for analyzing of large and complex databases and using the appropriate techniques.
- Improvement of existing ML infrastructure by thorough research and implementation of best practices.
- Explain about the complex processes of ML to laymen.
- Development and application of ML algorithms based on statistical modeling procedures.
- Finding patterns and predicting the unseen instances by usage of data modeling and appropriate evolution strategy.
Required Education
- An under-graduate degree in mathematics, data sciences, computer sciences and programming is required. Alternative fields like statistics or physics is applicable.
- Initial career options for ML engineers – Software Engineer, Software Programmer, Software Developer, Data Scientist and Computer Engineer
- Pursue Masters Degree in Computer science or software engineering or PhD in Machine Learning will provide great options for ML engineers.
Job roles
- Machine Learning Engineer
- Lead Machine Learning Engineer
- Senior Machine Learning Engineer
- Principal Machine Learning Engineer
- Machine Learning Software Engineer
- Machine Learning Research Scientist
- Data Scientist Positions
Salary and Job Prospects
Experience has a great impact on an ML engineer salary. The entry-level professionals are paid $95,000 yearly. ML engineers with 5-9 years of experience are paid $135,000 yearly. ML Engineers with more than 20 years of experience are paid $179,000 yearly.
There was a 330% increase in ML engineers’ job postings worldwide during 2015-2018. According to a report by Indeed, this profession is one of the most popular career choices and was awarded the Best Job of 2019 with 344% growth.
– Samiya Firdous
