Ilya Reznik, a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Twitter Cortex, views the ML engineer role as both exciting and challenging due to increased competition in the field. He believes it's a good time to enter the industry but notes that getting an initial foothold is more difficult than before. Ilya sees the rise of MLops and data-centric approaches, which will enable subject matter expertise and allow for better tooling around model development and evaluation. He emphasizes the importance of monitoring and observability in machine learning, citing examples such as addressing issues like racial bias and handling sudden changes like the pandemic. Ilya's work experience spans physics, OSHA, Adobe Analytics Cloud, and his current role at Twitter Cortex, where he aims to contribute to scaling ML infrastructure and improving model development processes.