How can one can aim for a career in machine learning?
Machine Learning is a really big field. Depending on what exactly you want to do, there might be huge differences.

Having said that, the following skills are helpful:


Programming, especially Python / C++
Frameworks like TensorFlow, sklearn, Torch, ...
Algorithms like neural networks (especially gradient descent), SVM, decision trees, clustering algorithms, Q-Learning, ...
Mathematics (e.g. probability theory / statistics, linear algebra, analysis for calculating gradients


Knowing how to program the GPU directly (CUDA) is probably not always necessary, but certainly a big bonus.

In case you're interested what you learn at KIT (Karlsruhe, Germany) in an introductory machine learning course, see my blog post for exam preparation (I'm sorry, it is mostly in German).

Online Courses

There are lots of online material for machine learning. For example an Coursera ML course