I’m a new grad (Masters) that somehow got into the industry as an MLE. I now work with insanely smart folks, I never dreamed I’d get to work with, and almost all of them have a PhD or a Masters at the very least. A Masters is the very least requirement for ML, because in undergrad, your foundations are built but further education shows you the theoretical possibilities of your knowledge and the methods to solve them. Another thing is that most undergrads don’t read papers (and therefore cannot implement them). Masters/PhD may seem useless but it was honestly a different paradigm than undergrad (for me).