The non-technical AI guy is on fire: He doesn't have an ML degree, but he got an offer from DeepMind

This was a bad taste in his mouth, and he was determined to catch up fast. At the end of his internship, he applied for a master's degree in electrical engineering, but was still interested in working for a large technology company.

To do this, he created a software engineering study plan and sat in on an undergraduate algorithms course. He went on a crazy learning journey while applying for jobs in large technology companies.

The process wasn't always smooth, with a Facebook interview in late 2017 and two Microsoft interviews in March and May 2018, but he was unsuccessful in getting the job. In February 2018, he passed a three-day entrance exam and successfully applied for the Microsoft ML summer course.

Acceptance notice for the Microsoft ML summer course

In early August, he travelled to Brazil for an internship. Three days later, he received an unexpected call from Microsoft telling him that he had been hired by the HoloLens team, the team that ran the summer course!

Without hesitation, he accepted the offer and left Brazil to join Microsoft as a software engineer in September. This is how he started his career as a SE and ML.

I have to mention that the challenge of "going to DeepMind" took root in his subconscious since he attended the summer course. Joining DeepMind seemed like a pipe dream to him at the time: all the DeepMinders he met on the course had graduated from Oxford and Cambridge.

During his time at Microsoft from 2018 to 2019, he did his best to learn SE and read a lot of programming books such as C++ by Scott Meyers, and in his spare time, he studied ML.

By the end of 2018, he had completed all of Enda Wu's courses on Coursera, attended an internal ML hackathon, an ML training course, and started reading relevant research papers.

In early 2019, he shared his first blog post on ML.

At the end of 2019, he was transferred to machine learning engineer and sent to the ICCV2019 conference.

 At the ICCV2019 conference, Xiao demonstrated HoloLens 2 at the Microsoft booth

Machine learning course

When he returned from ICCV2019, he was asked to implement a paper from scratch using PyTorch. At that time, he knew nothing about PyTorch. By completing this task, he was able to grow in leaps and bounds once again.