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OtherAround 9 months part time, roughly 7 months of ML and AI training plus 2 months of interview prep, at 10 to 12 hours a week·Premium, in the thousands of dollars, exact figure quoted only after a sales call

Advanced Machine Learning Course (Interview Kickstart)

3.6

This is not really an ML course in the way a university or DeepLearning.AI offering is. It is an interview machine pointed at FAANG and big tech, with the ML curriculum there to get you ready for the questions you will face. Judged on that goal it is competent, but you have to want that goal.

What We Liked

  • Instructors are working or former engineers from large tech companies, and the interview advice reflects that
  • Strong on the mock interview side, which is the part most people skip and then fail on
  • Covers a wide arc from classical ML through NLP, computer vision and recent GenAI and agentic topics
  • Practice heavy, with live coding sessions and graded assignments rather than passive video

What Could Be Better

  • Pricing is not published anywhere, and you only get a number after a call, which I treat as a warning sign
  • It is expensive enough that the maths only works if you actually land the high paying role
  • Aimed at people already comfortable with ML, so it is poor value as a first exposure
  • The whole thing is optimised for passing interviews, not for becoming a better engineer day to day

Detailed review

Interview Kickstart sells an outcome, not a subject, and you should read the whole program through that lens. The Advanced Machine Learning Course runs around nine months, with roughly seven months of curriculum spanning Python, classical machine learning, NLP, computer vision, reinforcement learning and the newer generative and agentic material, followed by a couple of months that are pure interview drilling. The teaching is done by people who have actually sat on the other side of the table at large tech companies, and that is genuinely the strongest part. The mock interviews, the feedback on how you communicate under pressure, and the sense of what a hiring committee is really listening for are things you cannot easily get from a self paced course, and they are the reason people pay.

Where I get uncomfortable is the money. The fee is not listed on the site, and you only find out the number once you have given them your details and taken a call, which is a pattern I have learned to distrust. These programs run well into four and sometimes five figures, and the honest way to think about it is as a bet on a salary increase rather than as tuition. If you land the role you were aiming for, the cost disappears into one or two paychecks.

If you do not, you have paid a lot for interview practice. The other thing to be clear about is the audience. This is not where you learn machine learning from scratch. It assumes you can already build and reason about models, and it spends its energy on getting you hired rather than on deepening your understanding.

So my take is narrow but firm. If you are an experienced engineer who specifically wants into top tier companies and you can stomach the price, it does the job it advertises. For almost everyone else, a strong fundamentals course plus your own interview preparation gets you most of the way for a fraction of the outlay.

[ final ]

The verdict.

Worth considering if you already know machine learning, are targeting a specific tier of company, and the salary jump clearly pays back the fee. If you are still learning the fundamentals or you do not care about FAANG style interviews, your money goes much further elsewhere.