Journey to ML, Part 2: Skills of a (Marketable) Machine Learning Engineer

Becoming a machine learning engineer still isn't quite as straightforward as becoming a web or mobile engineer, as we discussed in Part 1 of this series. This is despite all of the new programs geared toward machine learning both inside and outside of traditional schools. If you ask many people with the title of "Machine Learning Engineer" what they do, you'll often get wildly different answers. The goal of this post is to help you put together the beginnings of a mental semantic tree (Khan Academy's example of such a tree) for learning machine learning (à la Elon Musk's now famous method). As such, this post is probably going to have a bit more lists and hyperlinks than previous (or future) posts in this series. So, based on my own experiences, as well as reaching out to hundreds of machine learning engineers in both academia and industry, here's an overview of the soft skills, basic technical skills, and more specialized skills you'll need.