Some who read this newsletter have followed me for a year and a half and in that time have seen MLEPath (then BigTechMentor) change and morph in many ways. It has grown from a project I was dedicating about an hour per week to all the way to (now) a full-time gig!
That’s right, as of last week, I no longer have a day-job taking away time from helping you develop as a machine learning engineer. This was a difficult decision for me, however ultimately the right one.
So today, let me break with the usual newsletter format and tell you about where I’ve been, where I’m going, and what you can expect coming soon.
First, for those who don’t know, my name is Ilya and I have been in tech for almost 15 years (will be 15 this April). Of them I have spent almost 11 as a machine learning engineer!
Yes, machine learning engineers existed long before ChatGPT came onto the scene.
I have done ML for US Government, Adobe, Twitter, and Meta. I also run a consultancy that has helped dozens of startups and small companies with their ML strategy and implementation and have spent a bit of time as head of MLOps in a series B startup.
But my true passion is to teach and help engineers.
One of my fondest memories of my time at Adobe is of putting together a class for 500 engineers all over the world where me and 40 volunteers hands-on taught them fundamentals of ML.
As a TL I helped dozens of people to advance their ML careers, but dozens was not enough. So I started working with people one-on-one on my own site to help them clear technical interviews.
I am about to help 150th person land their dream job later this week, but many kept asking me questions well beyond the interview.
How to negotiate?
Which job to pick?
How to transition into ML?
How to get promoted?
How to stay up-to-date? …
So I started a YouTube channel to try to scale my influence. That channel now has over 1.7 thousand! subscribers.
Scaling from dozens to hundreds to thousands in a matter of 18 months is exciting and I really appreciate all the support I received along the way.
The next chapter of this journey starts today, with my newsletter’s move to Substack. I see this platform as a catalyst to enable me to help even more ML Engineers current or aspiring! If you know any, please share this publication with them!
I have consistently been holding office hours where you can ask me any ML or ML career question. These are free and you can schedule some time every week when you need to. This will not change, sign up here for November 27th
However, with Substack’s flexibility I am also introducing a paid membership to this newsletter. As a thank you, there will be additional office hour times and paid members will have access to full archive of posts as well as some other benefits. The membership is the lowest price Substack will let me charge, so if you find this content valuable and are in a position to help, please consider subscribing!
The old BigTechMentor ML Design course will be fully revamped by the end of the year. All who are subscribed to it will have access to the new course when it comes out in a few weeks.
YouTube content is coming back. Expect new videos regularly starting the week of December 9th. If you have requests, please let me know :) Yes, I will do a video where I walk through how I would solve an ML System Design problem (or two).
MLE Path Medium account will be deprecated and I will post on my personal one since several publications won’t allow me to syndicate otherwise. New content is also coming there the week of the 9th. Medium will be for technical deep dives (ex. Modern Techniques for Image ML) while substack will be primarily for career advice (onboarding, passing interviews, staying current…)
Thank you for your support! Have a great Thanksgiving and I will be back to helping you with your ML job search for 2025 next week!
P.S. Substack is not cooperating with my post migration efforts, the 12 MLEPath emails from the last 12 weeks will be posted here by Thanksgiving.
PPS: As a paid subscriber, there are a lot more times you can chose from for the office hours.