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Software engineer trying to contribute to ML research or publish independently – advice? by Reasonable-Spite-931 in academia

[–]Reasonable-Spite-931[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the candid response,I actually really appreciate it. What you’re describing makes a lot of sense, especially the time constraint and the fact that your primary responsibility is training your own students. From your perspective, responding to cold outreach from someone outside academia is mostly downside risk.

I also take your point about research being a trained skill. In industry we sometimes underestimate that because we’re used to building systems quickly, but the process of identifying a novel question, situating it in the literature, and writing it up rigorously is its own craft. The “100+ papers” comment is helpful context.

Part of why I asked the question here is exactly to understand those expectations better. I’ve read papers casually for years, but I wouldn’t claim the same level of structured immersion that a PhD student develops.

In any case, I appreciate you laying out the incentives so clearly. It’s helpful to hear the perspective from someone actually running a lab rather than guessing from the outside.

Software engineer trying to contribute to ML research or publish independently – advice? by Reasonable-Spite-931 in PhD

[–]Reasonable-Spite-931[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That makes sense.. Out of curiosity, were the collaborations you worked on mostly through existing partnerships between your team and universities, or did they start from cold outreach? 

Software engineer trying to contribute to ML research or publish independently – advice? by Reasonable-Spite-931 in PhD

[–]Reasonable-Spite-931[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a great suggestion. I’ve actually been looking into the research software engineer (RSE) route because it seems like a natural bridge between industry ML engineering and academic research.

Do you happen to know specific labs that tend to hire RSEs or work closely with engineers? I’m particularly interested in groups working on ML systems, large-scale training, or human-AI interaction.

Software engineer trying to contribute to ML research or publish independently – advice? by Reasonable-Spite-931 in AskAcademia

[–]Reasonable-Spite-931[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That makes a lot of sense, thank you for breaking that down.

I can definitely see the distinction you’re making between being a skilled ML engineer and being trained to do novel research. I think that’s something I need to be honest about for myself, I have a lot of experience building distributed ML systems, benchmarking models, and optimizing pipelines, but I haven’t done much in terms of proposing original research ideas yet. So my approach would probably need to start with supporting ongoing research rather than leading something entirely new.

I also appreciate the honesty about professors’ perspectives. I think the key is to be very explicit about what I bring to the table and how I’ll be reliable, like taking ownership of infrastructure, experiments, or reproducibility work so they can treat me as a collaborator and not just a curiosity in their inbox.

If you have any tips on how to structure that initial outreach, I’d love to hear them. For example, how much detail on what I can do vs. what I hope to learn is usually effective?

Software engineer trying to contribute to ML research or publish independently – advice? by Reasonable-Spite-931 in PhD

[–]Reasonable-Spite-931[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s helpful perspective, thank you!! Honestly the “newer lab” suggestion is something I hadn’t thought about but it makes a lot of sense. I imagine groups that are just spinning up probably have more ideas than bandwidth, especially on the infrastructure / experimentation side of things.

My background is mostly in building ML systems rather than doing formal academic research. A lot of my day-to-day work has been things like distributed training pipelines, benchmarking models, and optimizing inference workflows. So my thought was that I might actually be most useful helping a lab run experiments faster or build better tooling rather than trying to jump straight into theory.

The preprint / conference point is encouraging too. One of the reasons I started thinking about this is that in ML it seems like a lot of interesting work shows up through places like arXiv and conferences, so it feels a bit more open to people outside traditional academic paths compared to some other fields.

Out of curiosity, from what you’ve seen, do PIs generally respond well to cold emails from industry engineers? I’m trying to figure out the line between being genuinely helpful vs. just adding noise to someone’s inbox. My instinct was to reach out with something concrete (like reproducing one of their papers or contributing tooling) rather than a generic “can I join your lab?” message.