The Forward-Deployed Engineer: The AI FDE Certification

4.6 (21)

Dr. Greg Loughnane, Ph.D.

Author, The AI Engineering Bootcamp Book

Matthew Sharp

Author, LLMs in Production

+ Tyler Laughlin

The industry-standard certification for production AI FDEs.

The authors of The AI Engineering Bootcamp Book teamed up with the authors of LLMs in Production to produce this advanced, comprehensive, one-of-a-kind course spanning Q1 2027.

To compete with AI Forward Deployed Engineers at leading AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, you need to scope customer problems, build and test AI prototypes with users, deploy prototypes to existing production environments, and secure, operate, and improve production applications at scale that generate real ROI.

This course is for you if:

You truly believe that you can be a unicorn AI FDE, or
You're part of an FDE team of 2-3 people taking the course, and
You have direct support from your company or client to access users, engage with stakeholders, and drive one project from pilot to production in 10 weeks

This course is NOT for you if:

You do not work at a company, or
You work at a company, but they do not support you driving AI transformation

If you're too early in your AI career journey for this course, check out The AI Engineering Bootcamp as a first step.

What you’ll learn

The skills you need to succeed as an AI Forward Deployed Engineer in production environments.

Learn to ask the right questions and guide your organization through prioritization and problem scoping
Learn to move from MVP to PoC to production, and understand the right tools & techniques to get you there
Bring the fundamentally valuable token-minimization mindset to your company's leadership table

Learn to implement the right retrieval technique and when, from LLM Wikis to dense vector embedding RAG
Understand tradeoffs between tools, skills, MCPs, subagents, code mode, Universal Tool Calling Protocol (UTCP)
Learn to install guardrails at the right layer of your agentic systems

Run local OSS models aligned with your enterprise hardware
Bypass sensitive and private data restrictions with local synthetic data generation
Use best-practice tools to choose, host, and run local models

Understand how to answer the question "How do we know that this works and we can trust it?"
Go beyond simple vibe checks and evals with "What if?" scenarios that align directly with your business
Understand how to evaluate your agents systematically, no matter how they have been structured

Learn to enhance your own prompt injections through well-known prompt optimization techniques
Understand how Hugging Face got reward-hacked by OpenAI; learn advanced techniques like context bombs
Understand enterprise threats that cannot be solved with root-level access

Learn to be guided by wherever the bottleneck is in product development, not by what you like doing better
Understand the importance of removing features rather than adding features as you scale
Build solutions with performance, scalability, and security that are enough for your current user base

Learn directly from expert instructors

Dr. Greg Loughnane, Ph.D.

Building industry-leading AI training for engineers and teams since 2021

Matthew Sharp

Matt Sharp is a seasoned leader and professor in AI, MLOps and Engineering.

Tyler Laughlin

A background in BI, data science, machine learning, and cloud-native apps.

See all products from AI Makerspace

Who this course is for

Engineers working full-time inside a company that are prepared to bring a real use case from work and iterate on the AI solution weekly.
If you are a startup founder, consultant, big tech employee, or currently unemployed, this course is likely NOT for you.
If you are unable to get sponsorship from your company to take this course, this course is likely NOT for you.

Prerequisites

Git & Python mastery, Coding Agent (e.g., Claude Code or Codex) proficiency
VSCode with GitHub Copilot (or equivalent) should be your daily driver already.
Experience writing code that is deployed to production software environments
If you have never held a job where you contribute code to a production software environment, this class is not for you.
Machine Learning & Deep Learning fundamentals
This means an understanding of training, testing, and inference for various model architectures, including LLMs

What's included

Live sessions

Learn directly from your instructors in a real-time, interactive format.

Access to world-class experts & personalized feedback

In addition to being hosted by Dr. Greg, you will be taught in our lectures by world-class experts who do this work every day. Within breakout rooms, you will be guided by peer supporters who are on similar journeys to master the role of AI FDE. For each assignment, your peer supporter will provide personalized feedback

The AI FDE Certification

Join hundreds who have created real ROI for themselves and their companies through an AI Makerspace certification

Maven Guarantee

Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.

Course syllabus

20 live sessions • 10 projects

Week 1

Jan 12—Jan 17

☯️ Neither product nor engineering alone is enough

Jan
13
🏢 Enterprise Dev Environment
Wed 1/1312:00 AM—1:30 AM (UTC)
Jan
15
☯️ The Craft of AI Consulting
Fri 1/1512:00 AM—1:30 AM (UTC)

1 more item

Week 2

Jan 18—Jan 24

🏋️ Why open weights matter and what that means for FDEs

Jan
20
🏋️ Local Inference
Wed 1/2012:00 AM—1:30 AM (UTC)
Jan
22
🧪 Synthetic Data for Prototyping
Fri 1/2212:00 AM—1:30 AM (UTC)

1 more item

Testimonials

I joined AI Makerspace while looking to start my company, Publicus, and it’s also where I met my co-founder Joe. What amazed me was how inclusive the community is technical folks, researchers, and even non-developers and yet everyone still built, shipped, and shared real projects. The program completely reshaped how I use open-source tools and ship to production fast. I still rely on the teachings from [AI Makerspace] today. RAGAS and Evol-Instruct were game-changing takeaways that I now use to reduce hallucinations and build more reliable AI systems. It’s genuinely the best community for people who want to build real things in the real world
🔗 Hear Akash's Story
Akash Shetty
Co-Founder & CTO @ Publicus
The Aithon journey started out of [The AI Engineering Bootcamp, Cohort 4]. A year later, the project idea has morphed into an AI-native GTM platform for regulated financial services. We are helping large Fintechs grow and expand their presence in enterprise financial services accounts. We combine external public and proprietary signals with customer’s first party data to spot whitespace and drive expansion across financial services enterprise accounts.
🔗 Hear Nitin's Story
Nitin Gupta
Co-Founder & CEO @ Aithon
What you guys have built is insane! On a totally different plane than [other courses]. So many cool, high-energy people in one place. Plus, you guys have made it feel like a dev bootcamp some people pay $8k to $16k for!
Eric Riddoch
Course Creator @ MLOps Club