What does a Machine Learning Engineer actually do?

The short version

Machine learning engineers take models out of notebooks and make them work in production — training pipelines, deployment, monitoring, and the plumbing behind LLM features. It's software engineering plus statistics plus infrastructure.

The pitch: the highest-paying individual-contributor track in UK tech, and the one doing the automating rather than being automated. The catch: it's almost never a first job — most people arrive via software engineering or data science — and the interview bar and the maths are both real.

Entry routes that actually work

• Software engineer → ML — the most common route; engineers who add ML and MLOps skills.
• Data scientist → MLE — the natural sideways move toward the systems side.
• ML Masters/PhD — still the path for research-adjacent and frontier-lab seats.