In business management, product lifecycle is broken into 4 stages with the distinct pattern of sales over time: introduction, growth, mature, and decline. In the diagram below, I adapt the classic product lifecycle curve to show the engineering load over time in machine learning (ML): from model development to maintenance. Managing and coordinating different stages in ML lifecycle presents pressing challenges for ML practitioners.
The more I work on building end-to-end machine learning (ML) pipelines, the more I realize the importance of system design and infrastructure. ML shares many concerns with traditional software development, and poses new challenges to system design.
It’s been 3 months since I started my new position as a Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) at Spotify. What I like most about this position is that I get to participate in building an end-to-end pipeline, including ideation and experiment, data engineering, machine learning modeling, model serving, online A/B test, monitoring, and many more.