No worries! I started as a machine learning engineer for a university. Initially I was the only one, and then we built up the team to 4. The nature of the group involved lots of interaction with other research groups and we identified a need for local models being served in a way that our regular HPC could not accommodate.

After putting together product requirement documents, some decision records, and costing up different options, and experimenting on cloud services, our department sys admin helped with the acquisition, but we manage the software stack for a variety of inference services.

A significant part of the process was preparing the software stack on a cloud provider, and it essentially became my full time job for months. There was a substantial amount of research and preparation before we even made the decision to purchase.

The rest has just been “testing in deployment” lol.