Amal Agarwal

ML Software Engineer @ Meta (IG Ads)
5.0
(20 reviews)
10+ years in Data and Machine Learning
United States of America Active today Usually responds in a few hours

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About

Trying to break into Big Tech, transition into AI Engineering, or move to the next level in your career?

I’ve helped 100+ mentees prepare for interviews and accelerate their careers, with a focus on Machine Learning Engineering and AI Engineering roles.

My mentoring is practical, structured, and personalized. We define your target role and level, identify the gaps holding you back, and build a focused plan around the skills and interview signals that matter most.

Whether you are targeting hyperscalers such as Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, and NVIDIA, frontier AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, a startup, or an internal promotion, I can help you deepen your technical skills, communicate your impact, and position yourself for your next opportunity.

I help mentees prepare for ML and AI roles involving LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector search, reranking, agentic AI, tool calling, planning, memory, evaluation, guardrails, serving, and monitoring.

Mentoring and mock interviews:

1. ML, LLM, and Agentic AI System Design
Includes a free copy of my ML system design book. We cover problem framing, metrics, retrieval and ranking, RAG, vector databases, tool-using agents, memory, evaluation, latency and cost trade-offs, safety, serving, monitoring, and production design.

2. Coding Interviews
Pattern-first preparation focused on problem solving, edge cases, complexity, and confident communication.

3. Behavioral Interviews and Career Growth
Build a strong story bank, sharpen CARL responses, quantify impact, and communicate leadership, ownership, judgment, influence, and technical vision. I also help you show the scope and impact expected for promotions and senior roles.

4. Data Science and A/B Testing
Practice experiment design, power, bias, metric selection, logging issues, interpretation traps, and common interview traps.

5. Product Case Studies
Build metric trees, diagnose product problems, prioritize hypotheses, connect ML improvements to business outcomes, and deliver clear recommendations.

6. Statistical Modeling and ML Theory
Review assumptions, uncertainty, calibration, causal inference, ranking metrics, and model selection.

I’m a Machine Learning Engineer at Meta, building large-scale ML and AI systems for ads ranking, retrieval, personalization, and agentic AI. My work spans model development, experimentation, distributed training and inference, low-latency serving, monitoring, and tool-using AI systems.

Previously, I was a Data Scientist at eBay, where I developed learning-to-rank systems for search. I also hold a PhD in Statistics.

You do not need more generic advice. You need a clear target, honest feedback, deliberate practice, and guidance tailored to the ML or AI Engineering role and level you want.

Message me with your target role and biggest challenge, and let’s map the shortest credible path to your next ML or AI Engineering role or promotion.

Substack: https://cognicoreai.substack.com/subscribe

What mentees say

5 out of 5 stars

I highly recommend working with Amal if you want to elevate your ML System Design and technical communication skills. He provides an exceptional level of detail in his mock interviews, assessing not just your technical knowledge, but also your delivery, pacing, and interviewer interaction. Amal taught me how to properly structure my high-level designs, budget my time efficiently across clarifications, and deliver on various expectations. His mentorship bridges the gap between having good ideas and executing them perfectly under pressure. He is an asset to any ML engineer aiming for top-tier roles.

Varun

Varun

Standard Plan • 3 months

5 out of 5 stars

I had a great experience working with Amal as my mentor. He was incredibly helpful in preparing me for behavioral interviews, providing clear structure and actionable feedback that made a real difference in my confidence and performance. Amal took the time to understand my background and tailored our sessions to highlight my strengths while improving areas where I needed more clarity. His guidance on framing answers, telling compelling stories, and handling common behavioral questions was especially valuable. What stood out most was his practical approach—every session left me with specific improvements I could apply immediately. I feel much better prepared for interviews thanks to his support. I would highly recommend Amal to anyone looking to strengthen their behavioral interview skills.

Satya

Satya

Standard Plan • 9 months

Satya wrote 4 more reviews for the same mentorship

5 out of 5 stars

We had a couple of behavioral interview sessions. Amal gave a really nice framework on how to think about behavioral interviews, what to focus on, and what signals interviewer is looking for. My confidence interviewed after a couple of mock sessions.

Satya

Satya

5 out of 5 stars

Amal has been incredibly helpful in preparing me for both ML system design and behavioral interviews. Through our mock sessions, he provided detailed and actionable feedback on how to structure my responses for both junior and senior IC roles. His guidance on refining key concepts and building strong mental models has been invaluable in improving my interview performance.

Satya

Satya

5 out of 5 stars

Satya

Satya

5 out of 5 stars

I had a great mentorship session with Amal focused on transitioning from SWE into MLE. He provided clear, practical advice on how to navigate the switch, including which skills to focus on, how to build a strong portfolio, and ways to break into the field. Amal was encouraging, knowledgeable, and generous with his insights. I left the session with much more clarity and confidence about my next steps. Highly recommend speaking with him if you're considering a similar career move!

Satya

Satya

5 out of 5 stars

I'm working with Amal during my job search and interview preparation for ML and AI roles. He has helped me organize my job search, choose what to focus on each round, and show the right signals even with limited time. He provides guidance across the full interview stack, including my CV, behavioral interviews, ML system design, and LeetCode. I also appreciate that he understands and guides me on recent GenAI engineering trends. For LeetCode, he helps me study by patterns, with deeper explanations and templates instead of just solving random problems. His mentorship has helped me feel more focused, prepared, and confident in my next steps.

Faye

Faye

Standard Plan • 6 months

Faye wrote 2 more reviews for the same mentorship

5 out of 5 stars

Amal is a well-rounded mentor. I’ve worked with him for about 4 months, and he’s been very practical and consistent. He helped me build a simple prep system to stay organized and track progress. He made my ML system design answers clearer with solid modeling choices, tradeoffs, and metrics under time pressure. He also tightened my one-page resume to show senior ownership and improved my behavioral stories to highlight judgment and execution. His guidance made my preparation more structured, focused, and effective.

Faye

Faye

5 out of 5 stars

Amal is a great mentor with deep insights and high agency. He provided a clear, structured framework for preparing for Meta interviews, covering: coding, machine learning system design, and behavioral interviews in a systematic way. He helped me understand what top-tier interview readiness truly means and how to organize my preparation effectively. In just two sessions, I went from about 20% prepared to nearly interview-ready thanks to his frameworks and feedback. Strongly recommend him to anyone looking for quality and structure in their job search. I’ve been in the field for years, and his guidance still made a huge difference.

Faye

Faye

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