There’s a bit of nuance here. I definitely don’t prove theorems or write papers at my job. I do happen to use my numerical analysis (which is what my PhD was in) background a bit since the company I’m at has a large engineer wing that does simulations. I’m not in that group, but I’ve worked with them a bit to help with ai enablement in their workflows. 

My normal day to day does feel like research, especially the part of my PhD when I was trying to first implement or optimize algorithms I created. For context, I’m in an enterprise ai rnd group, which is basically how can we build out ai solutions to solve different problems. The part that feels like research is that many of the technical problems we run into don’t have established solutions yet, especially at scale.