[shortoncash]

Most ML jobs are sitting around scrubbing data. The fun math part is like 5% of the job, and usually there's some guy (or a small handful of guys) that's a PhD who is hired to do all of that because he was in the research area before he left academia.

I could be wrong, but this is my experience.

[softawre]

Agreed. We call that team "operations research" and they are all PhDs. The ML devs build the pipelines and deal with engineering concerns around having/moving/securing lots of data.