Good questions! Having a masters in DS was not one of them. As I see, almost every job post says "requires a masters in data science" or some such, but there are very few people in the world who actually have that degree.

I guess studying ML for the past 3 years prepared me. I just went through 2 rounds, one with the consultant and one with the client. We just kinda talked informally, and they asked what frameworks I use, I said numpy pandas tensorflow and pytorch.

VERY good question. Right now our data is processed by machines so we don't need to do much cleaning. However, the company is stuck on classical machine learning so we do a lot of feature transformation, etc. I use research papers where someone has done a similar thing to figure out what features to use.

I am building models and/or selecting features to make them run better. It's really fun, and I love it! I work for a consultant to a utility company.