AI Role Explainers
Pick any AI role and see what a real working day looks like — with salary context and honest assessments of what the job actually involves.
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ML Engineer
Builds and ships production machine learning systems
Salary (MY)
RM 10k – 22k / mo
Mid to senior. Junior roles start from RM 6k.
Key skills
A typical day
Monitoring review
Admin / opsCheck model performance dashboards. Flag any drift in fraud detection recall — looks like a 0.8% drop over 48 hours, worth investigating.
Code review
CollaborationReview two PRs from junior engineers. One has a subtle data leakage issue in the feature pipeline. Leave detailed comment explaining why it matters in production.
Experiment analysis
Deep workNew model architecture finished training overnight. 3% improvement on validation set but 40% slower at inference. Write up trade-off analysis for the team.
Cross-functional sync
CollaborationProduct wants new feature in three weeks. Honest answer is six. Negotiate scope — trimming three requirements gets it to four weeks without compromising quality.
Deep engineering work
Deep workRedesigning feature store to support real-time lookups for the fraud model. This is the work that moves the architecture forward. Block calendar, mute Slack.
Documentation
Admin / opsWrite runbook for the new serving infrastructure. Unglamorous. Essential. Saves hours of debugging at 2 AM when something inevitably breaks.
The honest realities
How people get here
Software engineer or data scientist who moved into productionisation. CS or EE background most common but not required.
All roles at a glance
ML Engineer
RM 10k – 22k / mo
Builds and ships production machine learning systems
Data Scientist
RM 8k – 18k / mo
Turns messy data into models and insights that drive decisions
AI Product Manager
RM 9k – 18k / mo
Shapes AI products from user need to shipped feature
Prompt Engineer
RM 6k – 14k / mo
Designs and optimises how AI systems understand and respond
MLOps Engineer
RM 10k – 20k / mo
Keeps production AI systems running reliably at scale
AI Research Scientist
RM 12k – 28k / mo
Advances the technical frontier through experimentation and publication