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How to become a Machine Learning Engineer

Becoming a Machine Learning Engineer is an in-demand career path. It requires deep expertise in Machine Learning and a strong network to carry you along. Here are some resources to help you on your journey.

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Why should you become a 
Machine Learning Engineer?

Machine Learning Engineer

Demand for experts in Machine Learning is growing rapidly. Companies are looking for people with deep expertise in the field of Machine Learning to help them build their products and services.

As a result, Machine Learning Engineers are in high demand and command high salaries. According to leading sources, the median salary for a Machine Learning Engineer is $150,000 and a senior Machine Learning Engineer can earn up to $200,000. Even entry-level positions can command great salaries.

No wonder that interest in a career in Machine Learning is growing rapidly. Explore the resources below to learn more about how to become a Machine Learning Engineer.

Table of Contents

Best books to build Machine Learning understanding.

A well-written and thorough book can be an amazing path to build deeper understanding and also act as a handbook as you discover the internet's vast resources.

These are our and our experts top picks to get started building career-relevant skills.

Introduction to Statistical learning

Introduction to Statistical learning

ISL is a fundamental book and popular amongst undergrad and grad students for its clarity and simplicity with explaining concepts. The math required to understand the book is kept to a minimum, making it unique in its format.

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Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Bishop's book on pattern recognition is a classic textbook and staple in Machine Learning. Beimg aimed at grad students, but also at researchers and practitioners, it's no easy lecture, but a truly fundamental course book.

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Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras and Tensorflow

Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras and Tensorflow

The hands-on Machine Learning book is an amazing piece by Aurélien Géron, taking you from the basics of Machine Learning to applying them to real-word scenarios all in one book.

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Pragmatic Programmer

Pragmatic Programmer

At least today, code is our door to building algorithms and complex Machine Learning systems. If you want to invest in becoming a more proficient Machine Learning professional faster, investing in code skills is the way to do so.

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Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Richard Sutton's book on Machine Learning is universally regarded as one of the most fundamental and important pieces on the matter. Reinforcement Learning is quickly becoming a major part of AI innovation, and a good read for any engineer and scientists to go through.

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Generative Deep Learning

Generative Deep Learning

It’s now possible to teach a machine to excel at human endeavors such as painting, writing, and composing music. With this practical book, machine-learning engineers and data scientists will discover how to re-create some of the most impressive examples o

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Federated Learning (Synthesis Lectures)

Federated Learning (Synthesis Lectures)

How is it possible to allow multiple data owners to collaboratively train and use a shared prediction model while keeping all the local training data private? In this book, we describe how federated machine learning addresses this problem with novel solutions combining distributed machine learning, cryptography and security.

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Mastering Machine Learning on AWS

Mastering Machine Learning on AWS

AWS is constantly driving new innovations that empower data scientists to explore a variety of machine learning (ML) cloud services. This book is your comprehensive reference for learning and implementing advanced ML algorithms in AWS cloud.

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Advanced Machine Learning with Python

Advanced Machine Learning with Python

Designed to take you on a guided tour of the most relevant and powerful machine learning techniques in use today by top data scientists, this book is just what you need to push your Python algorithms to maximum potential. Clear examples and detailed code samples demonstrate deep learning techniques, semi-supervised learning, and more - all whilst working with real-world applications that include image, music, text, and financial data.

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Probabilistic Machine Learning: Advanced Topics

Probabilistic Machine Learning: Advanced Topics

An advanced counterpart to Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction, this high-level textbook provides researchers and graduate students detailed coverage of cutting-edge topics in machine learning, including deep generative modeling, graphical models, Bayesian inference, reinforcement learning, and causality. This volume puts deep learning into a larger statistical context and unifies approaches based on deep learning with ones based on probabilistic modeling and inference.

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Courses to deepen your Machine Learning skills.

These days, courses are no longer a sequence of videos. They are usually accompanied by projects and a learning community, keeping you accountable and on the path.

Our experts recommend these courses, from free selections to paid programs.

Udacity's Machine Learning Nanodegree

Udacity's Machine Learning Nanodegree

Udacity has been a pioneer of Machine Learning courses since launching their wide range of ML, Data Science and Robotics courses a few years back. These Nanodegrees are pricey but often come with career support and human project grading.

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Fast.ai

Fast.ai

With the motto "making neural nets uncool again", fast.ai is a straight-to-the-point practical (and free!) course that is valued by Machine Learning enthusiasts and engineers worldwide. Fast.ai comes with a community, many practical projects and great content.

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Machine Learning A-Z™

Machine Learning A-Z™

Kirill Eremenko's course on Udemy is a classic with almost a million (!) students worldwide. A-Z takes you from a bit of coding knowledge to making your own predictions and building ML models pretty swiftly. At prices between $10 - $20 it's also cheaper than many alternatives.

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Deep Learning Specialization

Deep Learning Specialization

In five courses, you will learn the foundations of Deep Learning, understand how to build neural networks, and learn how to lead successful machine learning projects. 38% of students started a new career after completing this specialization.

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MIT Open: Linear Algebra

MIT Open: Linear Algebra

Math is the foundation of Machine Learning and much needed if you need to work on the inner logic of its systems. Senior engineers are encouraged to propose and submit their own papers – and getting your LinAlg back in order is a must for that.

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Lex Fridman's MIT Deep Learning

Lex Fridman's MIT Deep Learning

Lex Fridman is the instructor of an immensely popular and fundamental Deep Learning course at MIT. Together with the other MIT AI courses, this can help polish your skills and get the foundations right.

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Get the guidance you need to become a Machine Learning Engineer

There is no better source of accountability and motivation than having a personal mentor. What used to be impossible to find is now just two clicks away! All mentors are vetted & hands-on!

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Moon Ma 🇺🇸

Machine Learning Engineer at Amazon
5.0 (25)

I'm a biology-researcher-turned-machine-learning-engineer-turned-business-owner. Yep, that’s mouthful, just as any rich life is supposed to be. I landed my machine learning job in 4 months without a degree or experience, then joined Amazon as a full time machine learning engineer with only 9 months of experience. I've helped 60+ career changers …
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Amin Ghaderi 🇺🇸

Data Scientist || Machine Learning Engineer at Google
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Amin is a machine learning engineer / full stack data scientist, currently working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Google. Amin's method of mentorship is to empower the mentee. Helping mentees with totally different backgrounds (electrical engineering, biology, civil engineering), Amin understands the struggles many students have in fitting into …
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Joe Waugh 🇺🇸

Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at ThredUp
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Greetings! My name is Joe Waugh, and I am a Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at ThredUp. My expertise lies in data science, data engineering, customer analytics, and the realms of machine learning and deep learning. Leading the technical development of initiatives like fraud detection platforms and computer vision applications at …
Engineering & Data Data Science Python Deep Learning Machine Learning Statistics R
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Nikola Nikolov 🇨🇭

Senior Machine Learning Engineer / Scientist
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Welcome to my mentoring page! My name is Nikola and I am an experienced researcher/engineer in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning based in Switzerland. I have a PhD in NLP from ETH Zurich (top 10 CS school) and over 9 years research and development experience …
Engineering & Data Natural Language Processing Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Data Science Python PyTorch
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Shahzeb Naveed 🇨🇦

Data Science and Machine Learning Engineer at General Motors
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During my 5 years of data science experience at General Motors, Royal Bank of Canada and TELUS, I've successfully delivered multi-million dollar data science and automation projects at scale. I have strong knowledge of machine learning, statistics, A/B testing, optimization, time series analysis and distributed computing and I am highly …
Engineering & Data Data Science Machine Learning Deep Learning Python SQL Power Bi
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Ishan Patil 🇺🇸

Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Apple
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As a machine learning engineer with 6+ years of industry experience having worked at Amazon, Nvidia, a retail AI startup and now at Apple, I have helped many mentees throughout my career with interview preparation, switching over careers from traditional software engineering to ML roles, and positioning themselves to land …
Engineering & Data Interview Preparation Career Development Software Engineering Resume Review Career Growth Career
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The Machine Learning must-reads you shouldn't miss.

Key articles and posts of industry experts can help you get a better picture of what you are getting into.

In our opinion, these are some must-reads you really shouldn't miss.

Karpathy on "Software 2.0"

Andrej Karpathy is the Director of AI at Tesla. Before that, though, he authored this blog post in 2017 talking about Deep Learning as "Software 2.0" of some sort. A must-read if you ever want to have another way of thinking about ML.

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Simple Reinforcement Learning with Tensorflow

This 8-part series by Arthur Juliani (Deep RL researcher at Unity) is an amazing entry point to the new and mysterious advancements of Reinforcement Learning, perfectly suited for folks coming from other topics in Machine Learning.

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Building Safe A.I. (Trask)

Andrew Trask is a specialist in Federated Learning and Safe AI. In this blogpost, he writes about training a neural network that is fully encrypted during training (trained on unencrypted data).

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Opportunities and projects in the Machine Learning space.

In the end, advancing your career is all about getting the right opportunities at the right time and a good portion of luck.

These are some interesting things going on in the Machine Learning space and you probably don't want to miss them.

Specialize with Kaggle

It wouldn't be the first time I've seen someone get hired over good Kaggle results! Kaggle competitions are data science and ML projects that are graded through a public leaderboard. A good place on the leaderboard shows that you know your craft and can apply your knowledge to real-life problems!

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Find early stage positions

While Google & co. are saturated with academic talent, there are incredible opportunities to get your foot in the door quicker with an early-stage positions.

Today, startups and early-stage businesses are looking for ML engineers more and more for a wider variety of jobs than what's possible in the more established industry.

Platforms like AngelList can help you find those positions!

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Get into open-source

The world thrives on open-source software and this is no exception. Core contributors to core libraries and fast-growing tech like React, scikit-learn, Bitcoin and TensorFlow prove their abilities by going into the inner workings of a framework to improve it. For many companies, that's a desirable skill!

These projects are always looking for fresh faces. Grab an issue from the issue board or review a PR to get started!

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