Need Guidance on Career progression to a Sr DS / MLE role
Hi Everyone,
I’m currently a DS at a mid-sized fintech startup with 4 YoE and a TC of 16 LPA. In the first 2 years, I was a DA in a SBC.
My first 1.5 years as a DS in the current company was great with a steep learning curve. I was involved in end-to-end credit and marketing models (LightGBM/XGBoost) and built an internal RAG chatbot using LangGraph.
However, due to recent team exits, I was moved to a new org where I’m the first & the sole DS. There's almost no infra to support DS work, and the work has devolved into basic ad-hoc analytics for the last 6 - 8 months.
I’ve decided to move on and aim for an honest shot at Senior DS or MLE at FAANG
A few questions bugging me while planning my prep:
DSA Expectations: Is LeetCode Medium/Hard heavily tested for DS roles, or is that primarily for MLE / SWE tracks?
RecSys / Search vs. Tabular ML: My core work has been tabular models (credit scoring, churn, etc.). How critical is it to master Search and Recommendation Systems from scratch for interviews? Asking this as ive heard that is is a popular topic in interviews
If you've made a jump like this, what were the key focus areas for ML System Design and coding rounds?
Any guidance or personal experiences would be super helpful!
PS - used AI to refine the post.