What is it like to be a machine learning engineer in 2018?

Some of the pros

- good pay

- exciting time to be alive

- work often spans broad business departments, involves genuinely interesting engineering trade-off problems between accuracy, scale, budget, and interpretability

Some of the cons:

- You have to be wary to avoid companies in which machine learning is just a name for data engineering / devops / business analytics, or where it is hype or aspiration and no substance

- No matter what your job will mostly be the unsexy stuff to get a system working. Only maybe 10-20% is going to be the actual model development or experimental side

- Companies not yet well versed in machine learning can have huge sticker shock at what a competitive compensation package is like, and waste a lot of your time on interviews and end up way off the mark on compensation.