Machine Learning Engineers — Partners for Scaling AI in Enterprises
Enterprises across many industries are adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) at a rapid pace. There are several reasons for this accelerated adoption, including a need to realize value out of the massive amounts of data generated by multi-channel customer interactions and the increasing stores of data from all facets of an enterprise’s operations. This growth prompts a question, what knowledge and skill sets are needed to help organizations scale AI and ML in the enterprise?
To answer this question, it’s important to understand what types of transformations enterprises are going through as they aim to make better use of their data.
Growing AI/ML Maturity
Many large organizations have moved beyond pilot or sample AI/ML use cases within a single team, to figuring out how to solidify their data science projects and scale them to other areas of the business. As data changes or gets updated, organizations need ways to continually optimize the outcomes from their ML models.
Mainstreaming Data Science
Data Science has moved into the mainstream of many organizations. People working in various line-of-business teams like product, marketing and supply chain are eager to apply predictive analytics. With this growth, decentralized data science teams are popping up all over a single enterprise. For many people looking to apply predictive techniques, they have limited training in data science or knowledge of the infrastructure fundamentals for production-scale AI/ML. Additionally, enterprises are faced with a proliferation of ad-hoc technologies, tools and processes.
Increasing Complexity of Data
Having achieved some early wins, often with structured or tabular data use cases, organizations are eager to derive value out of the massive amounts of unstructured data, including language, vision, natural language and others. One role that organizations are increasingly turning to for help to meet these challenges is the Machine Learning Engineer.
What is a Machine Learning Engineer?
I have observed that as organizations mature in their AI/ML practices, they move beyond Data Scientists toward hiring people with ML Engineering skills. A qualitative review of hundreds of Machine Learning Engineer job postings sheds light on why this role is one way to meet the transformative needs of the enterprise. For example, examining the frequency of certain terms in the free text of the job postings surfaces several themes;
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
ML Engineers are closely affiliated with the software engineering function. Organizations hiring ML Engineers have achieved some wins in their initial AI/ML pilots and they are moving up the ML adoption curve from implementing ML use cases to scaling, operationalizing and optimizing ML in their organizations. Many job postings emphasize the software engineering aspects of ML over the pure data science skills. ML Engineers need to apply software engineering practices and write performant production-quality code.
DATA
Enterprises are looking for people with the ability to create pipelines or reusable processes for various aspects of the ML workflow. This involves both collaborating with Data Engineers (another in-demand role) and creating the infrastructure for robust data practices throughout the end-to-end ML process. In other words, ML Engineers create processes and partnerships to help with cleaning, labeling and working with large scale data from across the enterprise.
PRODUCTION
Many employers look for ML Engineers who have experience with the end-to-end ML process, especially taking ML models to production. ML Engineers work with Data Scientists to get data and models ready for deployment at scale; building pipelines for continuous training, automated validation and version control of the model.
SYSTEMS
Many ML Engineers are hired to help organizations put the architecture, systems and best-practices in place to take AI/ML models to production. ML Engineers deploy ML models to production either on cloud environments, or on-premise infrastructure. The emphasis on systems and best practices helps to drive consistency as people with limited Data Science or infrastructure fundamentals learn to derive value from predictive analytics. This focus on systematizing AI/ML is also a critical prerequisite for developing an AI/ML governance strategy.
What do ML Engineers work on?
- Big data
- Complex problems
- Driving insights
- Realizing business value (e.g. customer acquisition and growth)
- Scale — projects impacting millions of users (B2B and consumers)
- Establishing best practices
How do ML Engineers work?
- Cross-functional collaboration across many roles
- Cross-business
- Software development practices
- Agile
- Leveraging best practices
Where do ML Engineers reside in an organization?
Within enterprises, ML Engineers reside in a variety of teams including Data Science, Software Engineering, Research & Development, Product Groups, Process/Operations and other business units.
What industries are looking for this skill?
While demand for ML Engineers is at an all time high, there are several industries that are at the forefront of hiring these roles. The industries with the highest demand for ML Engineers include; computers and software, finance and banking and professional services.
What’s to learn about this role?
As AI and ML practices continue to grow and mature in enterprises, Machine Learning Engineers play a pivotal role in helping to scale AI/ML usage and outcomes. ML Engineers enable Data Scientists to focus on what they do best — by establishing infrastructure, processes and best practices to realize business value from AI/ML models in production. This is especially the case as data volumes and use cases complexity grows.
Closing Note: This summary of ML Engineering jobs was not based on an assessment of a specific job posting or even one specific to the enterprise I work in, it reflects a qualitative evaluation of general themes across the spectrum of publicly available job postings for ML Engineers — a critical role for enterprises to scale AI/ML.
About the author: Jennifer Otitigbe both writes and conducts research at the intersection of people, technology and design. She currently leads a specialized UX team at Google, working on software tools to enable enterprise developers to create with AI and ML.
