What skills my dream jobs want

This week has seen a lot of time sunk into exploring the career landscape.

Over the weekend I managed to read the fourth chapter of The RL book. I must say, I am pretty confused. Might not be picking this stuff up as naturally as I hope. Maybe The RL course will reinforce concepts.

Back to career searching, I have noticed trends of what in general employers want (with respect to Machine/Reinforcement Learning jobs)

• Degree in STEM field (some don’t specify degree at all, others expect an MSc/MEng, others a PhD!)
• Proven record of working in research environment, sometimes high impact research publications desired.
• Understanding of linear algebra, probabilistic methods, geometry processing, statistics, calculus
• Demonstrated experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, data science, algorithm design, optimization, numerical methods
• Python coding with strong engineering practices
• C/C++ coding comes up almost as often as Python
• Experience in Multi-threaded and parallel/distributed computing
• Contribution to open-source projects
• Experience in Linux environment
• Experience with a deep learning framework, PyTorch being the most in fashion
• Experience with CUDA/OpenCL/OpenGL
• Docker/Kubernetes sometimes comes up (as well as DevOps experience)
• Experience with physics engines (simulations) such as MuJoCo

Still a long way to go until I meet all criteria. Just have to balance the act of applying to positions just within my reach with continuous learning so that I may fulfill most of these criteria.

Hopefully next week will bring more progress in RL (although I am relocating back to Cape Town so maybe not!).