[shankr]

Yeah I was in the same boat coming from classical ML. I am just doing MLOps/DE these days. Although I have been down levelled to almost junior level after having 10+ years of experience. Struggling a bit with being treated like a junior again! Much less autonomy to pick my own task.

[extr]

I'm going through a similar transition right now. I wouldn't say I've been downleveled but I left FAANG to go to a startup (pay cut) where I've been able to transition pretty fluidly from "Data Science" to "MLOps + some backend SWE + some infra + some actual ML Engineering (non-DL)". Aside from the pay cut (which was not the end of the world, think high 200s to low 200s), it's worked out very well, and I'm getting the experience that I think will allow me to rebrand successfully.

As to whether that rebrand itself is successful, I don't know. It feels like the DS role is undergoing a maturation where different skillsets are being cleaved into different roles. I was always a more natural fit for the Ops side, I don't have the academic creds for a research-oriented position. But I'm not sure how much of ops means "LLM ops".