Free Lesson
System Design for AI Agents: Senior vs Staff
45 min
Jul 21, 2026 1:30 PM
Virtual (Zoom)
In this video
What you'll learn
The failure modes that kill agents in production
The five things that break every LLM agent after the demo, and the design decisions that stop each one.
How to design around a non-deterministic dependency
Retries, fallbacks, guardrails and eval gates: the patterns that make an unreliable model safe to ship in production.
The judgment that separates senior from staff
How to make the architecture call when AI is in the stack, and defend the trade-offs to your team and leadership.
Why this topic matters
94% of engineering leaders now report an agentic AI skills gap. The gap isn't the model, it's production judgment: knowing why agents break under real traffic, and how to design around a non-deterministic dependency. That judgment is what separates senior engineers from staff in 2026. This is the production-grade version of the session 600+ engineers signed up for.
