Disciplines

ML Engineering & Platform

Infrastructure, tooling, and platforms that enable teams to build, train, and serve models reliably.

Overview

ML Engineering & Platform is the foundation that all other disciplines build upon. It encompasses the compute infrastructure, development environments, training pipelines, serving systems, and platform tooling that enable data scientists and ML engineers to go from idea to production efficiently.

Key Practices

Training Infrastructure

Provide scalable, cost-efficient compute for model training. This includes GPU/TPU cluster management, job scheduling, distributed training frameworks, and resource allocation policies. Teams should be able to launch training jobs without managing infrastructure directly.

Serving & Inference

Deploy models as reliable, low-latency services. This covers model serving frameworks, autoscaling, batching strategies, A/B testing infrastructure, and canary deployments. Serving systems must handle traffic spikes, graceful degradation, and zero-downtime updates.

Feature Stores

Centralize feature computation and serving to ensure consistency between training and inference. Feature stores reduce duplicated effort, prevent training-serving skew, and provide a shared vocabulary of features across teams.

Experiment Tracking

Track experiments systematically — hyperparameters, metrics, artifacts, and code versions. Reproducibility is essential for debugging, auditing, and iterating on models. Every experiment should be traceable back to its exact configuration.

ML Pipelines

Orchestrate end-to-end workflows from data ingestion through training, evaluation, and deployment. Pipelines should be versioned, testable, and composable. Invest in pipeline reliability — a broken pipeline blocks the entire team.

Developer Experience

Reduce friction for practitioners. This includes standardized project templates, local development environments that mirror production, clear documentation, and self-service tooling. The best platform is one that teams actually want to use.

Related Roles

Related Principles