A programmer who only works on algorithms is a rare beast in the wild. For some, it sounds like a dream job — others would never touch a job with such a description.
However, there are some jobs that involve lots of algorithmic design:
- Computer science researcher. When working as a computer science researcher in academia, I spent a lot of time developing, analyzing, presenting, and implementing algorithms. Especially if you work in a theoretical computer science department, you will spend maximal time on developing new algorithms.
- Data scientist. It has been called the “sexiest skill in the 21st century“. As “Data is the new oil“, data scientists earn a lot of money, too. Their main work revolves around using different fields such as mathematics, statistics, computer science, visualization, and others to extract knowledge from data. You need to write a lot of customized scripts—each can be considered a new algorithm.
- Machine learning engineer. Developers who focus on the promising area of machine learning are in high demand today. It has been reported that there are already the first few Million Dollar Earners working for machine learning companies in Silicon Valley. As it turns out, machine learning engineers spend a lot of their time creating (and applying, tweaking, testing, and debugging) machine learning algorithms. Every problem is different and customizing the training algorithms is common practice among the star engineers.
Of course, you can always create your own job as a writer, author, teacher, or freelancer.
Here’s an article about how much you can expect to earn as a Python freelancer.
If you want to become a better coder, first download the Python cheat sheets I designed for upcoming Python stars!