Top 10 (Mostly) Free Resources for a QA to ML Engineer Transition
Techstrong.ai, Friday, October 16th, 2026
A former QA manager turned ML eval engineer shares tested, mostly free courses for moving from software QA into AI testing.
Lilia Urmazova, who spent 20 years in QA before becoming a senior ML evaluation engineer, distinguishes three paths: traditional QA using AI tools, AI QA engineers who test AI features in standard apps, and ML evaluation engineers who test AI-native applications.
She recommends learning Python, the lingua franca of ML, and building a real project with Claude Code in learning mode rather than vibe coding.
Her resource list includes a Coursera generative AI testing course, free LLM evaluation guides and courses, Anthropic Academy courses on Claude, Claude Code, subagents and the Claude API, and resources for more advanced evaluation work.