Pass the Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer Exam (2023)

3 min readOct 23, 2022

Hey everyone, I hope you all are doing well. Recently, I passed the very famous Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer certification exam. In this article, I will share the strategy and resources that helped me achieve this.

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About the exam

The Professional Machine Learning Engineer exam assesses your ability to:

Frame ML problems
Develop ML models
Architect ML solutions
Automate and orchestrate ML pipelines
Design data preparation and processing systems
Monitor, optimize, and maintain ML solutions

The price of the exam is $200 and the duration is 2 hours. You can expect 60 questions to be answered within the given time.

My Background

I have been tinkering around Google Cloud services for the past 2 years and am working as a Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps Engineer. This ensured that my work experience also contributed to the knowledge base I possess which helped me with understanding Google Cloud at a detailed level. Since I hadn’t been working on data and ML services, I had to make an extra effort to learn about machine learning.

Preparation Strategy

I had been preparing for all the data-related exams together for around 2 months. So I made a parallel approach to learning for the certifications.

Visit the Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer page on Google. This will give you an overview of the exam and what is required to complete the certification.
Understand what the exam is all about. Visit the exam guide to see the contents in detail. You will get a solid understanding of the content you will need to prepare for the exam.
Visit the official Google Cloud Platform documentation to clearly understand each of the GCP services. These would make your GCP knowledge but you still have another essential factor to cover: “Hands-on experience”.

“No technical certification in the world will be useful for you if you don’t know how to implement it in the real world scenario.”

Exam Experience

Since I am a newbie to machine learning, I found the exam extremely difficult. But, I had been pushing myself to learn the ML concepts for some time and that helped me a lot in answering the questions. Some of the ML questions were answered through my intuition. Thanks to Vertex AI and its components, I was able to answer those questions without dropping much sweat.

I was kind of confident that I’d fail but I was totally surprised to see that I passed. I believe this was because I didn’t have any confidence in Machine Learning and I learned them just for the certification without having any work experience. The exam was hovering quite a lot around Vertex AI and some questions were based on the different machine learning concepts. For example, underfitting, overfitting, and parameter tuning were some of the topics I came across. Overall, it was equally tough as the Data Engineer exam for me but I’m so glad that I passed.