MLOps & Production Pathway

Machine Learning Engineer Roadmap

Master Math, Supervised/Unsupervised Algorithms, Feature Pipelines, Experiment Tracking with MLflow, Docker Microservices, and Model Drift Monitoring.

Step-by-Step Learning Stages

1 Weeks 1 - 4

Math, Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) & SQL

Master Linear Algebra, Probability Distributions, Hypothesis Testing, SQL queries, Pandas, NumPy, and Seaborn for data visualization.

Pandas & NumPy Seaborn / Matplotlib SQL Queries Statistics
2 Weeks 5 - 10

Classical Machine Learning Algorithms

Learn Linear/Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forests, Gradient Boosted Trees (XGBoost, LightGBM), K-Means Clustering, and PCA with Scikit-Learn.

Scikit-Learn XGBoost / LightGBM Cross-Validation PCA
3 Weeks 11 - 14

Feature Engineering & Data Pipelines

Master target encoding, outlier detection, scaling, imputation, feature stores (Feast), and automated data pipelines using PySpark and dbt.

Scikit-Learn Pipelines Feast Feature Store PySpark
4 Weeks 15 - 18

MLOps, Experiment Tracking & Model Registry

Track metrics and model versions with MLflow and Weights & Biases. Version large dataset artifacts using DVC (Data Version Control).

MLflow Weights & Biases DVC
5 Weeks 19 - 24

Deployment, Serving & Drift Monitoring

Package models into containerized FastAPI services with Docker. Detect data and concept drift using Evidently AI, Prometheus, and Grafana.

FastAPI Docker Evidently AI Prometheus / Grafana

Recommended Portfolio Projects

3 hands-on projects to demonstrate production ML capabilities.

BEGINNER

Real Estate Price Prediction Service

Clean property dataset, train XGBoost model with cross-validation, package into a FastAPI REST endpoint, and containerize with Docker.

Stack: XGBoost, FastAPI, Docker, Scikit-Learn
INTERMEDIATE

E-Commerce Customer Churn Pipeline

Track hyperparameter tuning runs with MLflow, build automated Scikit-learn preprocessing pipelines, and render predictions via Streamlit.

Stack: MLflow, LightGBM, Streamlit, Pandas
ADVANCED

End-to-End Automated Credit Scoring MLOps Platform

Combine Feast feature store, DVC data versioning, MLflow model registry, Airflow automated retraining, and Evidently AI drift alerts.

Stack: Feast, DVC, Airflow, MLflow, Evidently AI