Preparing for Professional Machine Learning Engineer (PPMLE) – Outline

Detailed Course Outline

Module 0 - Introduction

Topics

  • Course agenda
  • Module agenda
    • The value of Google PMLE certification
    • The role of an PMLE
    • About the Cymbal Retail (fictional company used in the course)
    • Resources to support your certification journey
    • Creating a study plan

Objectives

  • Explain the value of the Google PMLE certification
  • Describe the role of a Professional Machine Learning Engineer
  • Explain what Cymbal Retail is, and how the company will be used throughout the course.
  • Identify resources to support your certification journey

Module 1 - Architecting low-code AI solutions

Topics

  • Ira needs to understand customer segments using BigQuery and a clustering model.
  • Sasha needs to predict customer value using AutoML Cymbal Retail’s customer dataset.
  • Taylor needs to build a conversational AI assistant for customers using Vertex AI Agent Builder and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
  • Diagnostic questions
  • Review and study planning

Objectives

  • Identify your level of knowledge in developing and implementing BigQuery ML and AutoML machine learning solutions.
  • Determine the skills needed to select appropriate ML APIs, prepare data effectively, and build custom models using AutoML.

Activities

  • Lecture
  • Diagnostic questions
  • Quiz

Module 2 - Collaborating within and across teams to manage data and models

Topics

  • Use Google Cloud's products and Cymbal Retail's rich data to design a model to predict which high-value customers are likely to stop purchasing (also known as customer churn).
  • Answer diagnostic questions.
  • Review the information and plan your study.

Objectives

  • Identify your level of knowledge in exploring, preprocessing, and managing organization-wide data.
  • Identify your level of knowledge in addressing privacy implications and leveraging tools like Vertex AI Feature Store.
  • Determine the skills needed to prototype models using Jupyter notebooks on Google Cloud.
  • Determine the skills needed to select appropriate backends, implement security best practices, and integrate with code repositories.

Activities

  • Lecture
  • Diagnostic questions
  • Quiz

Module 3 - Scaling prototypes into ML models

Topics

  • Use Google Cloud's products and Cymbal Retail's rich data to build and scale customer churn prototype into a production-ready model
  • Answer diagnostic questions.
  • Review the information and plan your study.

Objectives

  • Identify your level of knowledge in scaling ML prototypes into production-ready models
  • Identify your level of knowledge in selecting appropriate ML frameworks, model architectures, and modeling techniques based on interpretability requirements.
  • Determine the skills needed to train models effectively, including organizing and ingesting training data on Google Cloud.
  • Determine the skill needed to utilize distributed training techniques, perform hyperparameter tuning, and troubleshoot training failures.

Activities

  • Lecture
  • Diagnostic questions
  • Quiz

Module 4 - Serving ML models

Topics

  • Use Google Cloud's products and Cymbal Retail's rich data to deploy a customer churn model and use it in production for inference.
  • Answer diagnostic questions.
  • Review the information and plan your study

Objectives

  • Identify the level of knowledge needed to effectively serve models in production.
  • Identify the level of knowledge needed to select between batch and online inference, utilize various serving frameworks, organize a model registry, and conduct A/B testing for model optimization.
  • Determine the skills needed to scale online model serving, including leveraging Vertex AI Feature Store.
  • Determine the skills needed to manage public and private endpoints, choose appropriate hardware, optimize serving backends for throughput, and fine-tune models for optimal performance in production.

Activities

  • Lecture
  • Diagnostic questions
  • Quiz

Module 5 - Automating and orchestrating ML pipelines

Topics

  • Use Google Cloud’s products to orchestrate the entire machine learning pipeline for seamless execution and continuous improvement with customer churn.
  • Answer diagnostic questions.
  • Review the information and plan your study.

Objectives

  • Identify the level of knowledge needed to develop and maintain end-to-end ML pipelines.
  • Identify the level of knowledge needed to validate data and model, consistent preprocessing, hosting options, component identification, parameterization, triggering mechanisms, compute needs, orchestration strategies.
  • Determine the skills needed to automate model retraining, including establishing retraining policies.
  • Determine the skills needed to implement CI/CD model deployment, and track and audit metadata (model artifacts, versions, data lineage).

Activities

  • Lecture
  • Diagnostic questions
  • Quiz

Module 6 - Monitoring ML Solutions

Topics

  • Use Google Cloud’s products to ensure the customer churn model remains robust, reliable, and aligned with Google’s Responsible AI principles.
  • Answer diagnostic questions.
  • Review the information and plan your study.

Objectives

  • Identify the level of knowledge needed to assess and mitigate risks in ML solutions.
  • Identify the level of knowledge needed to build secure ML systems, align with responsible AI practices, evaluate solution readiness, and utilize model explainability on Vertex AI.
  • Determine the skills needed to monitor, test, and troubleshoot ML solutions.
  • Determine the skills needed to establish continuous evaluation metrics, monitor for training-serving skew and feature drift, compare model performance against baselines, and investigate common training and serving errors.

Activities

  • Lecture
  • Diagnostic questions
  • Quiz

Module 7 - Your next steps

Topics

  • A sample study plan for the exam
  • How to register for the exam

Objectives

  • Review a sample study plan for the exam
  • Learn how to register for the exam

Activities

  • Create your study plan for the exam
  • Identify a date to take the exam based upon your plan
  • Register for the exam