
Ask HN: Advice on Transitioning from Data Scientist to ML Ops Engineer - rollo_fuaxsao
A bit of background; I have no formal education past (UK) A-levels (I studied music production undergrad for a year before dropping out in 2012) since then I&#x27;ve worked in IT support whilst teaching myself how to code in JavaScript and Python, this lead to a job as a Full Stack web developer at a pharma company which I held for 3 years. I then jumped on the Data Science bandwagon and in 2016 moved to a Data Science team within the same organisation.<p>My role in this team was focused mainly on how we could productionize and scale our models due to my background in web dev and deploying web apps. So I&#x27;ve done a lot of model optimisation, containerization, CI&#x2F;CD and architecture within all 3 of the big cloud providers over the years but still feel I lack a lot of the skills needed to be a full DevOps Engineer. I did really enjoyed this work and in retrospect believe it was more of an MLOps role but due to personal relocation needs I had to leave in late 2019 where I joined a more &#x27;traditional&#x27; retail company where the Data Science team is essentially a renamed Data Analytics team. Most of the team currently use SQL, SAS and Excel for their work and we don&#x27;t currently have any cloud compute or admin privileges on our machines to run any non white listed programs (our IT support team don&#x27;t even know what docker is) which has caused me much frustration.<p>I would greatly appreciate and advice or recommendations on how best to pivot towards a MLOps Engineering role as my current Org (500+  employees) don&#x27;t see the need for this role at this time.
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rollo_fuaxsao
*The reason I joined my current Org was during the interview process I was sold a 'Digital Transformation Project' which I would supposedly have an impact on transitioning the team to a more product delivery focused Data Science team but due to changes in upper management this has fallen through and I now mostly work on producing spreadsheets, slide decks and coding in SQL

