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For the past few years, JPMorgan has been busy building out its machine learning capability underDaryush Laqab, its San Francisco-based head of AI/machine learning products, who was hired from Google in 2019. Last time we looked, the bank seemed to be paying salaries of $160-$170k to new joiners onLaqab's team.

If that sounds appealing, you might want to watch the video below so that you know what you're getting into. Recorded at the AWS re:Invent conferencein December, it's only just made it to you YouTube. The video is flagged as a day in the life of JPMorgan's machine learning data scientists, butLaqab arguably does a better of job of highlighting some of the constraints data professionals at allbanks have to work under.

"There are some barriers to smooth data science at JPMorgan," he explains - a bank is not the same as a large technology firm.

For example, data scientists at JPMorgan have to check data is authorized for use, saysLaqab: "They need to go to a process to log that use and make surethat they have the adequate approvals for that intent in terms of use."

They also have to deal with the legacy infrastructureissue: "We are a large organization, we have a lot of legacy infrastructure," says Laqab. "Like any other legacy infrastructure, it is built over time,it is patched over time. These are tightly integrated,so moving part or all of that infrastructure to public cloud,replacing rule base engines with AI/ML based engines.All of that takes time and brings inertia to the innovation."

JPMorgan's size and complexity is another source of inertia as multiple business lines in multiple regulated entities in different regulated environments need to be considered. "Making sure that those regulatory obligationsare taken care of, again, slows down data science at times," saysLaqab.

And then there are more specific regulations such as those concerning model governance. At JPMorgan, a machine learning model can't go straight into a production environment."It needs to go through a model review and a model governance process," says Laqab. "- To make sure we have another set of eyes that looksat how that model was created, how that model was developed..." And then there are software governance issues too.

Despite all these hindrances, JPMorgan has already productionized AI models and built an 'Omni AI ecosystem' to help employees to identify and ingest minimum viable data so that they canbuild models faster. Laqab saysthe bank saved $150m in expenses in 2019 as a result. JPMorgan's AI researchers are now working on everything fromFAQ bots and chat bots, to NLP search models for the bank'sown content, pattern recognition in equities markets and email processing. - The breadth of work on offer is considerable. "We play in every market that is out there," saysLaqab,

The bank has also learned that the best way to structure its AI team is to split people into data scientists who train and create models and machine learning engineers who operationalize models, saysLaqab. - Before you apply, you might want to consider which you'd rather be.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

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JPMorgan's head of machine learning explained what it's like to work there - eFinancialCareers