Career Advice?

Hello all,

I'm currently a mathematics phd student at a big state school, and I am considering leaving my graduate program with a master's degree (in May. I do not have any publications, and my only work experience of note has been as an instructor for various math courses). I started off with an interest in pure mathematics, but for the last year or so I have been working on inverse problems in imaging, specifically, stuff related to wavelet frames & total variation regularization, l_1 methods. An 'inverse problem' in this context is more or less something like "I'd like a nice looking picture, but all I've got is this blurry + noisy thing, can you fix it up for me?", but it can also include things like inpainting or to a certain extent, segmentation. One typical way of doing this is to use some variational model -- your restored image minimizes an energy -- and then solve it by some reasonably clever optimization algorithm. So I've got some background in numerical optimization & convex analysis, and this has been my first point of contact with machine learning. My second point of contact is from watching most of the lectures and doing most of the homeworks over at Learning from Data

My interest in machine learning, broadly speaking, stems from two curiosities. The first is that I'd like to better understand how to model the world (or at least parts of it). In image restoration, for example, the 'space of natural images' is so huge and wildly incomprehensible that the classic 'geometric' approach of many models seems to be falling way short of what's possible. The second curiosity is that I'd like to better understand how decisions can be made in the face of uncertainty, incomplete data, etc. My interest in machine learning, more narrowly speaking, is that I'd like to work on real problems and get $$$.

So with that introduction, I'd like to solicit your advice :)

Specifically, what are some important things I should be aware of when trying to land an entry level job? What 'technologies' should I spend some time with? How can I market myself, given my background? Or really, if you have any other advice, I'd love to hear it.