Great to read about your rationale and your vision about your career! AI/ML is definitely the right thing to focus on. Congrats and I wish you all great things with the change!
Hi Ryan, can you also write about skills required to get into Software Engineer, AI/ML on Infra. I am mostly getting calls for software engineer, product (mid level). How much AI/ML experience is needed? Do you need to be master at distributed system? How much is good enough to perform?
I didn't need to do any technical preparation for the team transfer talks. I just talked about my past work and performance. After 3 conversations with folks on the new team, my new manager said we're good to move forward with the team switch.
I think Meta may have unusually high team mobility policies though.
Internal transfers are very common at Meta. There's some basic rules (e.g. you must be meeting expectations + can't have transferred within the last X months) but otherwise it's easy
The process was:
1. I saw a post about the opportunity internally and reached out
2. Took 3 calls with various people on the team which weren't really interviews. Just some light conversation about my motivations for the switch + past performance
3. New manager gave me approval that the role was mine
4. Told my old manager about the switch and he helped me coordinate with HR
Great to read about your rationale and your vision about your career! AI/ML is definitely the right thing to focus on. Congrats and I wish you all great things with the change!
Thank you Gregor :)
Excellent, good to hear such stories
Hi Ryan, can you also write about skills required to get into Software Engineer, AI/ML on Infra. I am mostly getting calls for software engineer, product (mid level). How much AI/ML experience is needed? Do you need to be master at distributed system? How much is good enough to perform?
There are many AI Infra roles where you only need systems experience (although ML experience helps).
You can learn ML-specific stuff in the role to and succeed. People often pick up the domain knowledge after joining.
Hey Ryan. Did you have to do any technical preparation before having the conversation with the hiring manager ?
I didn't need to do any technical preparation for the team transfer talks. I just talked about my past work and performance. After 3 conversations with folks on the new team, my new manager said we're good to move forward with the team switch.
I think Meta may have unusually high team mobility policies though.
Hi Ryan, how did the approval of your manager process looks like? And how common is internal transfer in Meta that you personally see?
Internal transfers are very common at Meta. There's some basic rules (e.g. you must be meeting expectations + can't have transferred within the last X months) but otherwise it's easy
The process was:
1. I saw a post about the opportunity internally and reached out
2. Took 3 calls with various people on the team which weren't really interviews. Just some light conversation about my motivations for the switch + past performance
3. New manager gave me approval that the role was mine
4. Told my old manager about the switch and he helped me coordinate with HR
This whole process took ~1-2 weeks