Design a Production RAG System Live

Hosted by Aki Wijesundara and Manu Jayawardana

Mon, Aug 10, 2026

2:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Engineering Bootcamp and Certificate: Build and Ship Production AI Agents
Dr. Aki Wijesundara and Manu Jayawardana
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What you'll learn

Structure a RAG design from sources to evaluation

Follow a six-part outline that covers what interviewers and production both demand.

Diagnose why retrieval returns the wrong chunks

Work through the three causes of bad retrieval and the fix for each one.

Name the failure modes before you are asked

Cover staleness, chunk boundaries and ranking so the follow-up questions land easy.

Why this topic matters

Ask an AI engineer to design a RAG system and you learn everything about them in ten minutes. Weak answers stay at the prompt layer. Strong ones walk through data sources, chunking, retrieval quality, ranking, evaluation and the ways it fails. This is the most common opener in AI engineering interviews and the most common thing built badly in production.

You'll learn from

Aki Wijesundara

AI Advisor | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Aki Wijesundara is an AI leader with a PhD in Machine Learning and extensive experience mentoring startups at Google’s AI Accelerator. With a career spanning both research and applied AI, Aki has taught 5,000+ students worldwide how to design and deploy production-ready AI systems.

He has worked across cutting-edge areas of applied AI, from LangChain and RAG pipelines to observability and large-scale deployment. As a researcher and educator, Aki bridges the gap between theory and practice, making complex systems approachable and actionable for engineers, founders, and product leaders.

Aki is also a frequent speaker and advisor to organizations adopting AI, helping them transition from experimentation to production at scale.

Manu Jayawardana

AI Founder | CEO at TAI Labs | Co-Founder of Snapdrum

Manu Jayawardana is a serial entrepreneur with multiple AI startup successes.

He is also the Co-Founder of Snapdrum, an AI consultancy helping companies integrate and automate their businesses using AI. Through Snapdrum, Manu has worked with top startups and enterprises across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, advising on automation, product development, and AI strategy.

Currently, Manu is the Co-Founder & CEO of Krybe, an AI voice agent startup in London transforming how businesses automate customer interactions. His experience spans fundraising, scaling products, and leading teams to deliver production-grade AI solutions adopted globally.

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