[hongloumeng]

I'm a professor of machine learning and I also work for a large tech company. I've worked for startups in the past. My PhD is in stats.

Large tech companies hire economists. Go to Linkedin and search "economist Amazon" or "economist Microsoft." Find some early or mid career people. Then you can look at roles and titles they took after school and extrapolate from there.

Make sure you can talk a good game about causal inference. As an economist, you ought to know about econometrics-flavored causal inference ideas like instrumental variables, propensity scores, regression discontinuity, etc.

And, though you don't want "computer science based" roles, make sure you have the skillset to pass a data scientist interview. I suggest online exercises to prepare for those skills rather than course for credit at your school. I like Datacamp.

Small tech companies hire data scientists. They don't care if your degree is in physics, economics, or math, so long as you can do what's needed. When an early stage tech company is hiring for a data science role, they care more about the technical skill set and the ability to learn than exactly how good they are at whatever domain they come from. This is because early stage startups tend to have more fluid role definitions because much work needs to be done. Most of that work is technical.

[b20000]

an economist is not a math graduate, and asking for hardcore math level statistics on top of computer science level programming skills is unrealistic. someone close to me has 3 degrees in economics/comm eng. and a PhD and went through these ridiculous interviews and eventually walked away.