Internship Curriculum
6-Month Deep Dive
Specialization and scale. Go from foundational ML to building autonomous agents and production-grade systems.
Months 1-2
Engineering Foundations & Backend
Advanced Engineering Stack
Before modeling, you need to master the environment.
- Software Engineering: Design Patterns, Clean Code, Git Workflows.
- FastAPI Mastery: Asynchronous endpoints, Pydantic validation, Dependency Injection.
- Containerization: Docker, Docker Compose, Multi-stage builds.
- Database Design: SQL (PostgreSQL) vs NoSQL (MongoDB/Vector DBs).
Project 1: Scalable Data API
Build a high-performance REST API that ingests real-time data, processes it asynchronously using Celery/Redis, and stores it. Full Docker deployment required.
Months 3-4
Deep Learning & Computer Vision
Neural Architectures
Understanding the backbone of modern AI.
- PyTorch Deep Dive: Custom Datasets, Training Loops, Auto-grad.
- Computer Vision: CNNs, Transfer Learning, Object Detection (YOLOv8).
- Image Segmentation: U-Net architecture, Medical Image Analysis.
Project 2: Real-time Object Detection Service
Create a video analytics pipeline that detects PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) on construction workers in real-time. Serve the model using FastAPI and WebSockets.
Months 5-6
Generative AI & Agentic Workflows
LLMs & Agents
Building systems that think and act.
- Advanced Prompt Engineering: Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thought, ReAct.
- LangChain & LangGraph: Building stateful agents, Cyclic graphs, Human-in-the-loop.
- Multi-Agent Systems: Orchestrating multiple agents to solve complex tasks.
- Vector Search: Hybrid search (Sparse + Dense) with Pinecone/Weaviate.
🏆 Capstone: "Autonomous Customer Support Agent"
Build a production-grade Customer Support Chatbot using LangGraph and FastAPI.
- Features: Intent classification, RAG for policy lookup, Action execution (processing refunds via API).
- Architecture: Stateful graph with memory, handling interruptions and confirmations.
- Deployment: Deployed on Cloud (AWS/Azure) with tracing via LangSmith/Arize.
Bonus
Interview Preparation Kit (50 Questions)
Comprehensive prep for Engineering and Data Science roles.
🐍 Python & System Design (10)
- Explain the GIL and how to achieve true parallelism in Python.
- How does Python's garbage collection work (Reference counting vs Generational)?
- Design a URL shortening service (System Design).
- How would you handle 1TB of data in a Pandas workflow? (Dask/Spark/Chunking).
- What is the difference between concurrency and parallelism?
- Explain Dependency Injection in FastAPI.
- How do REST and GraphQL differ? When to use which?
- What is a Decorator? Implementation of a retry decorator.
- Explain Asynchronous programming (async/await) in Python.
- How do you secure an API? (JWT, OAuth2, Rate Limiting).
🤖 Machine Learning & MLOps (20)
- What is Model Drift (Data vs Concept drift)? How do you detect it?
- Explain the difference between Batch Serving and Online Serving.
- How does XGBoost differ from Random Forest under the hood?
- Explain the trade-off between Precision and Recall.
- What is A/B testing in the context of ML models?
- How do you handle missing data in production pipelines?
- Explain Quantization and Pruning for model optimization.
- What is Shadow Deployment?
- How does Docker help in ML reproducibility?
- Explain the architecture of a Transformer model.
- What is the attention mechanism mathematically?
- Difference between L1 and L2 regularization.
- How do you handle imbalanced classes (SMOTE, Focal Loss)?
- What is a Feature Store? Why do we need it?
- Explain Gradient Descent and its variants (Adam, RMSprop).
- What is Transfer Learning?
- How do embeddings work?
- Explain ROC-AUC curve.
- What is K-Fold Cross Validation?
- How to debug an overfitting neural network?
🧠 GenAI & LLMs (20)
- What is RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)?
- Explain the difference between Encoder-only (BERT) and Decoder-only (GPT) models.
- What is the Context Window? How do we handle long contexts?
- Explain Temperature and Top-P sampling.
- What is LangChain? How does it work?
- What are Hallucinations? How do we reduce them?
- Explain ReAct prompting technique.
- What is Fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA)?
- How do Vector Databases work? (HNSW, Cosine Similarity).
- What is LangGraph? Difference from standard chains.
- How do you evaluate an LLM application? (RAGAS).
- What are Agents? How do they differ from Chains?
- Explain Tokenization. Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE).
- What is Grounding in LLMs?
- How to handle PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in prompts?
- What is Function Calling in OpenAI models?
- Explain the Vanishing Gradient problem.
- What is Zero-shot vs Few-shot learning?
- Challenges of deploying LLMs in production (Latency, Cost).
- Future of LLMs: What is Mixture of Experts (MoE)?