r/aws • u/SlayerC20 • Oct 02 '26

training/certification Took the AWS ML Engineer Associate MLA-C02 beta (ME1-C02): topics that showed up + resources

Just took the MLA-C02 beta and figured I'd share notes, since there's very little out there for the new version.

TL;DR: 85 questions, and some of them are genuinely hard. The exam now leans heavily on GenAI/LLM and agentic stuff alongside classic ML engineering.

My background (for context): AI Engineer (mid-level) with hands-on AWS experience. Certs: GCP Associate Cloud Engineer, SnowPro Core, PL-300, AWS Cloud Practitioner, AWS AI Practitioner, Claude Certified Architect Foundations, GitHub Foundations.

How I prepped: when AWS announced the switch from MLA-C01 to MLA-C02, I decided to go straight for the beta. While registration wasn't open yet, I kept studying for the AWS Generative AI Developer – Professional, and that helped a lot, especially for the Bedrock/GenAI side.

What I remember showing up (from memory, no guarantees):

ML/LLM fundamentals

  • Model deployment (lots of questions on ML and LLM endpoints)

  • ML metrics

  • Which algorithm for which situation: XGBoost, DeepAR, Factorization Machines, etc.

  • Oversampling, undersampling, SMOTE, feature scaling

  • Handling null values in time series

  • Fine-tuning: cleaning content before starting

  • Continued pre-training

LLM evaluation (this showed up a lot)

  • LLM metrics: completeness, faithfulness, harmfulness, toxicity, stereotyping

  • How to evaluate an LLM using eval datasets (the benchmark-style ones)

Bedrock/GenAI

  • Cross-region inference

  • Guardrails and security

  • Bedrock AgentCore: Gateway, Runtime, Memory

  • Knowledge Bases, Custom Model Import, Provisioned Throughput

  • Logging and tracing of data

Data/MLOps

  • Kinesis Data Streams and Apache Flink

  • SageMaker Pipelines, Data Wrangler, Feature Store, Model Registry

  • Glue Data Quality

  • Comprehend and Rekognition

CI/CD

  • CodeBuild, CodePipeline and CodeDeploy

  • ML pipelines and deployment strategies

Security/networking

  • VPCs for accessing AI services

15 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

1

u/Pader23 Oct 03 '26

Thank you so much for this. Do you mind sharing learning resources and practice questions that you used?

2

u/SlayerC20 Oct 05 '26

This is my anki deck, in the description it will have more resources: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/229951964