Specialty MLS-C01 Retired
Retired AWS Specialty cert for ML practitioners. Covered SageMaker, data engineering for ML, modeling, and deployment. Retired March 31, 2026.
The AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty (MLS-C01) was AWS's flagship ML certification for data scientists and ML practitioners. It validated deep knowledge of the full ML lifecycle on AWS: data preparation, feature engineering, model training and tuning, deployment, and monitoring using Amazon SageMaker and related services.
The exam covered four domains: Data Engineering (20%), Exploratory Data Analysis (24%), Modeling (36%), and ML Implementation and Operations (20%). Candidates needed strong familiarity with SageMaker (Studio, Autopilot, Clarify, Model Monitor, Pipelines), S3, Glue, Kinesis, EMR, and common ML frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn. Mathematical concepts including statistics, linear algebra, and probability were also tested.
This certification was retired on March 31, 2026. AWS replaced it with the Machine Learning Engineer – Associate (MLA-C01), which focuses more on MLOps and deployment rather than theoretical modeling. Candidates who held MLS-C01 should consider transitioning to MLA-C01 for continued recognition of their ML expertise on AWS.
Data scientists, ML practitioners, and ML engineers who design and build ML solutions on AWS.
Prerequisites: 1–2 years of hands-on ML experience on AWS, familiarity with ML algorithms, and experience with Python or R.