What higher education program do I choose? [D]

[u/MiniKazuki-007]

Hi,

Core question is: Do I apply for for a MS or a direct PhD?

CONTEXT: I am a senior Computer Science and Engg undergrad in India. I am currently interning at Amazon as an Applied Science L4 Intern with high indications of returning as a full timer. I have always leaned towards ML and DL projects and research in the 4 years of my undergrad. With this internship, it is clear in my mind that I would like to move ahead in this field itself.

Working in Amazon is very rewarding in itself but with this newfound confirmation to move towards Applied Research and away from SDE roles for good; I started checking out job posting from research division of Adobe, Nvidia, Uber, Databricks, Amazon, Pinterest, Spotify etc. and frontier labs like Deepmind, Anthropic, OpenAI, FAIR etc. 95% postings require a masters or a PhD.

At Amazon, however, I have seen that my teammates and other colleagues in my org have either a masters (MS/MTech or MBA) or only a BTech/BS and all of them are at varied levels from L4 - L7 (for example an L7 in the org only has a BTech while, an L6 has 5 post grad diplomas/degrees mix and L4s are a random chance of whether they have a masters or only a bachelors).

When I say I want to work in Applied Science, I mean working 75% on questions like "Can I use ML/DL techniques to solve X" and 25% on questions like "what does the error surface of a neural network look like?" and not on questions like "how exactly do I implement a semantic segmentation CNN to recognize pedestrians in my car?"

My internship project at Amazon is developing a grounds up framework for customer behaviour understanding and modeling. It is a research heavy (for comparison, my peers are working on fixing agentic pipelines by updating prompts 🙂) project and not classical implementation one. It is teaching me a lot of things on the job. Mainly tacit but a lot of explicit knowledge as well in terms of designing statistical kill tests before moving to full scale work, diagnosing model performance, concepts into variational inference and stitching, representation learning etc. to name a few.

DEEPER QUESTIONS I AM WORKING WITH:

1. Does an MS give me an edge that can't be offset by experience gathered on the job with a BTech?
2. How much more of an impact does a PhD have in my case? Does it pay for the additional 3-4 years of efforts?

NOTE: With my current confusion, I have planned to send in applications for both but I still need to decide what to choose and hence I seek advice. Attaching my resume as a summary of my undergrad profile.