Notion

Google

Bloomberg

Scale AI

Accenture

Paden Gayle

Founding FDE @ Notion | O'Reilly Author | Ex-Google, Bloomberg 

Why Your AI Pilot Wont Survive Production & How FDEs Fix it

Founding FDE @ Notion | O'Reilly Author | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE

Reyhan Merekar

Founding FDE | AI Educator

The three failure modes that kill AI integrations after the demo works, with a real engagement story for each.

Why enterprise AI projects stall

How a massive one-to-one migration request became a phased plan that shipped, and the scoping ladder behind it.

Scope vague asks into shippable plans

Five questions security teams ask about AI integrations, including MCP-based ones, and how to pre-answer them.

Get through security review faster

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

Owner/CEO, AI Makerspace

AI Makerspace

AI Fund

FourthBrain

University of Dayton

Dr. Greg Loughnane, Ph.D.

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

Author, LLMs in Production

Matthew Sharp

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

Cohort 1

Cohort 2

TL;DR: The <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://aimakerspace.io/the-aie-bootcamp-changelog/">curriculum changelog</a> shows our path from 2024 to today.Today, expertise in Agentic AI that can answer the questions "what should we build and why?" AND "how should we build it today?" is highly valued.This is what AI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) do.The best production engineers can also answer the "how do we scale it, securely?" question.The best FDEs are rooted in core concepts and code across product management, machine learning, and software engineering. We tie everything learned in this course back to the fundamentals.This course is designed for you to build 🏗️, ship 🚢, and share 🚀 your way through today's AI product-engineering landscape by focusing on a single problem that matters for your company. Through accountability, repetition, and community, you will generate ROI for yourself and your company.Just ask our hundreds of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://aimakerspace.io/graduates">Certified AI Engineer Graduates</a>.AI Makerspace is the only certified enterprise training partner of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/a-meaningful-milestone-today-for-ai-makerspace-ugcPost-7460037108691476481-0wES?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=member_desktop&amp;rcm=ACoAAAOfOE4BdOGPD97rGOwB0qdCpNDB_wvyxsI">Andrew Ng &amp; Kirsty Tan's AI Aspire</a> on Maven. Learn more about custom offerings <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://aimakerspace.io/agentic/">here</a>.Please note: our cohorts are staffed with rotating expert instructors, peer supporters, and graders.

The industry-standard certification for production AI FDEs.

Scope problems & their solutions better than Anthropic & OpenAI FDEs 

Apply best-practices from MVP to production

Understand why open weights matter and how to use them

Embrace evals as the language that connects business to engineering

Understand why security and adversarial techniques are first-class issues

Understand scaling and what it takes from product and engineering perspectives

VSCode with GitHub Copilot (or equivalent) should be your daily driver already.

Git & Python mastery, Coding Agent (e.g., Claude Code or Codex) proficiency

If you have never held a job where you contribute code to a production software environment, this class is not for you.

Experience writing code that is deployed to production software environments

This means an understanding of training, testing, and inference for various model architectures, including LLMs

Machine Learning & Deep Learning fundamentals

Aspiring AI Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) who are currently employed in either an ML Engineering or Software Engineering role.

The #1 FDE Skill Isn't AI or Coding. It's Storytelling!

Top 1% AI Expert, Ex-@Google, Microsoft

Microsoft

The Wharton School

Intel

Priyanka Vergadia

AI & Cloud leader @Microsoft @Google | Visual Storyteller | TED Speaker

I've built and hired FDE teams, DevRel and Solutions Engineers for 10+ Years. This workshop teaches what hiring managers look for beyond coding!As a Software Engineer or AI Engineer, you can build agentic workflows and ship AI apps in days. That's not what makes a good FDE.What kills FDE careers early: a CTO wants faster deployments, you jump to CI/CD tooling. The engineering team is uncomfortable you're there, you don't notice. Someone hands you a pre-scoped project, you build without asking if it's the right problem.FDE roles are everywhere: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic are all building this function. But engineers getting those offers aren't winning on technical chops. They ask questions, keep going past the first answer, figure out who does the work, who feels threatened, what's politically doable. Not just tech. People. Org charts. They leave with scoped projects the customer actually wants built.In this workshop you will:<ul><li>Run real discovery conversations with enterprise customers</li><li>Navigate stakeholders who don't all agree and some who don't want you there</li><li>Turn a business goal into a scoped project you can deliver</li></ul>AI and code got you this far. This gets you to FDE.

Go from engineer to FDE with the SCOPE Method: uncover problems, manage politics, define outcomes, influence without authority.

STUDY & CONNECT: Run executive discovery that uncovers the real business problem

OBSERVE: Double-click past surface-level asks to find the real problem

PEOPLE: Navigate stakeholder politics and influence without authority

EXECUTE: Scope projects tied to outcomes and present with confidence

Software Engineers: You ship production systems but have never run customer discovery or scoped a project from a vague exec ask.

Solutions Architects Consultants: You have stakeholder skills but need the framework to own outcomes and shape projects, not just sell them.

Technical Product Managers: You define what gets built but have never embedded with a customer's engineering team to ship it yourself.

Master the FDE skills companies now expect

AI Entrepreneur | Ex-Google, Microsoft

Aishwarya Srinivasan

AI Engineering Lead | Founder

Arvind Narayanamurthy

September 2026 Cohort

‼️ LIMITED SEATS ‼️50% off for Early Birds Use code: 50OFFForward Deployed Engineering is becoming one of the most important roles in AI because companies are no longer just asking, “Can we build a demo?” They are asking, “Can this agent work inside our real customer environment?”That requires a very different skill set. FDEs need to understand how LLMs behave, how RAG systems fail, how agents call tools, how enterprise APIs and knowledge bases fit together, and how to deploy systems that can handle latency, cost, scale, security, and reliability constraints.This workshop is designed to bridge that exact gap. You will go from AI fundamentals to building a working agent, connecting it to real tools and enterprise systems, and deploying it on Google Cloud with Vertex AI. The goal is not surface-level AI literacy. The goal is to think, build, debug, and ship like the engineer companies trust to take AI from prototype to production.

You’ll learn to build, debug, deploy, and explain production AI agents like a Forward Deployed Engineer.

Build AI agents that work beyond the demo

Think like a production AI engineer

Deploy agents into real customer environments

Future FDEs For people who want to break into Forward Deployed Engineering or AI implementation roles.

Customer-facing technologists For solutions engineers, TAMs, consultants, and architects moving closer to AI systems.

AI career switchers For engineers and technical professionals transitioning into agentic AI and production AI roles.

Go from "nodding along in AI meetings" to the person who writes the spec, 
runs the eval, and owns the go/no-go decision.

Cohort 1 — Founding (August 2026)

Applied AI educator · for the rest of us

Karthik V

Applied AI educator · Forward Deployed delivery 

<pre><code>Your team just got asked to scope an AI feature. Engineering wants requirements. 
Leadership wants a demo. Your QA team wants to know how to test it. And nobody 
has a playbook.

You're a PM, BA, QA engineer, or delivery lead and you're being asked to own 
decisions that didn't exist in your job description two years ago.

The problem isn't knowledge. It's framework. User stories don't work for 
probabilistic systems. Test plans break on outputs that change every run. Sprint 
"done" criteria don't cover an eval phase. And when something ships broken, 
nobody has the vocabulary to describe what went wrong.

This course gives you the framework the AI Development Lifecycle (ADLC) and 
the production tools to apply it on your real use case.

Run a suitability assessment before engineering starts. Write a Specify document 
that constrains every agent. Build an eval program, score it in EvalForge in 30 
seconds, and make a data-backed go/no-go call. Dispatch agents with Grill Skill 
Controlled by your own guardrails. Configure governance in the Admin Console.

Leave with a complete portfolio built on your own project. No code. No ML 
background required.</code></pre>

The AI project playbook for PMs, BAs, and QA already in the room.

Run a suitability assessment before engineering starts

Write a Specify document agents can actually enforce

Design a BMAD multi-agent blueprint

Build an eval program and make a data-backed go/no-go call

Dispatch constrained agents with Grill Skill

Configure production governance and brief your VP

PMs and BAs writing requirements for AI features and finding that user stories don't work for probabilistic systems.

QA engineers and delivery leads whose test plans and sprint "done" criteria break the moment an AI feature enters the sprint.

Agentic AI

Coding with AI

AI Workflows

Claude Code

OpenClaw

Vibe Coding

AI Evals

AI Transformation

RAG & Search

AI for PMs

AI for Engineers

AI for Designers

AI for Marketers

AI for Founders

Product Sense

Product Discovery

User Research

Prototyping

Growth

Analytics

Tech Foundations

Strategy

Influence

Leadership

Career Growth

Machine Learning

LLM Ops

Context Eng

Security

System Design

Figma

Design Systems

Visual Design

Design Strategy

Automation

Content Marketing

Demand Gen

Go-to-Market

Product Marketing

Positioning

Social Media

Brand

B2B Marketing

SEO & AEO

AI for Leaders

AI Governance

Communication

Management

People Operations

Exec Presence

Storytelling

Goal-setting

Personal Brand

Fundraising

Everyone

Operators

Data Scientists

Business Analysts

User Researchers

Customer Success

Project Managers

HR Professionals

Sales People

Lawyers

Finance

Investors

Real Estate

Educators

Creators

Accelerate Your Career

Product managers who drive strategy, development, and launch of products.

Engineers and engineering leaders who build, deploy, and scale software systems.

Applying AI tools and techniques to professional workflows — assign alongside more specific AI topics.

Securing software systems — application security, threat modeling, authentication, and infrastructure protection.

Leading organizational AI adoption — change management, strategy, and building AI-ready teams.

Why Your AI Pilot Wont Survive Production & How FDEs Fix it

What you'll learn

Why this topic matters

You'll learn from

Paden Gayle

Reyhan Merekar