BUILD AI AT WORK: BRING A REAL PROBLEM, CONSTRAINTS, CLIENTS, AND STAKES
The AI FDE Certification
An industry-standard certification for forward-deployed engineers and builders ready to solve problems and ship production AI systems at work.
Please review the syllabus and consider joining us for the next cohort, starting in January 2027.
Cohort begins soon, $5,250 per individual
Build AI at Work →
Now in Session: AI FDE Certification
Build. Ship. Share. And do it better with a community. Our next 10-week program for the AI FDE Certification starts January 12th, 2027.
The AI FDE Certification by AI Makerspace is here, and this one's different. Students are building an AI application around problems and constraints at work.
If you've learned AI engineering with us before at Bootcamp, or that's too basic, and you're ready to apply production AI in your role, use this course as a next step.
We'd love to have you join us for FDE 2 from January 12th to March 26th, 2027.
Grow Your Career and Systems You Can Build with an AI FDE Certification
Get the industry-standard AI FDE Certification you'll want for building better systems and thriving in your organization. By signing up for this certificaiton, you'll step up to build, evaluate, and deploy agentic AI systems in production over 10 weeks.
From RAG to Agents to Evals to Production, and all of the unique constraints in your organization — AI Makerspace takes builders through the full arc of shipping real, agentic AI systems.
Why Software Engineers and Data Scientists Choose AI Makerspace
We don’t accept everyone into this learning experience and community. This program is designed for qualified technical leaders who are building systems. Because more tutorials, tools, token budgets, more “Intro to ChatGPT,” and prompt tricks aren’t the answer you’re looking for. You want the reps, and to add in systems thinking. Most importantly, you want to generate outcomes and ROI from what you build.
The Forward-Deployed engineer is a career that typically requires a minimum of five years experience in software engineering and deployment. If you’re not ready or there yet, build your first application, or reference our AIE Bootcamp and free AI engineering courses on how to do this. That’s the entry point
Recap What Forward-Deployed Engineers are Learning
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FDE Cohort 1 Session 2: Thinking Like a Product Person (Before You Write Any Code)
A recap of Session 2 of The AI FDE Certification, Cohort 1 (#FDE1) · By the AI Makerspace Curriculum Team Session 2…
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FDE Cohort 1 Kickoff: Setting Up Your Enterprise Development Environment to Build with AI
A recap of Session 1 of The AI FDE Certification, Cohort 1 (#FDE1) · By AI Makerspace The first week of the…
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The AI FDE Onramp: How to Become a Forward-Deployed Engineer
Over 150 engineers signed up for The AI FDE Onramp, a free lightning lesson we ran on Maven on September 29, 2026….
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Enterprise AI Capability Benchmarking is Here: What Are Your Scores?
If you’re here, then you’ve probably seen this happen. Whether in the initial days of adopting AI, or wondering where the impact…
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Best Multi-Agent Frameworks for Enterprise Teams in 2026
A quick comparison of the best multi-agent frameworks. Includes LangGraph, CrewAI, Microsoft Agent Framework, Google ADK, and Claude Agent SDK, and why it matters for production readiness….
Partnerships And Tools
This AI Forward Deployed Engineering Certification program is always current by training thousands of engineers and working at the edge of applied AI.
The instructors you'll learn and build with are certified AI engineers themselves and are actively in production and driving ROI in their roles. At AI Makerspace, we are practitioners and builders, and we provide a growing global community for you to build alongside.
Because we believe building, shipping, and sharing is the foundation of real learning. For larger teams to join, please explore our group rate of $3,200 per student, or explore our custom enterprise training.
Our team has contributed to ecosystems connected to:
- Shaped cohort programs with AI Aspire, Andrew Ng’s advisory firm
- Anthropic and Claude Certified Partner
- DeepLearning.ai
- LangChain
- Arcee AI
- Vibrant Labs
- LlamaIndex
Build. 🏗️ Ship. 🚢 Share. 🚀
Training you to build, deploy, and improve your own real AI systems is what we do. This is not more theory or hypothetical use cases.
Every week through the AI FDE Certification, you will:
- Build your own agentic application
- Ship a real working system
- Share what you’ve created to a group
We reduce the complexity of modern AI engineering into a structured, repeatable process.
You will learn to balance:
- Foundational patterns (RAG, agents, evals)
- Practical system design
- Real-world execution
The result:
At the end of these 10 weeks, you don’t simply understand AI systems; you have built a real one and know which one comes next. If you're up for the challenge, welcome!
To join us:
- View our full course requirements, syllabus, and complete your AI FDE Certification application.
- Your application will be reviewed by our team to share the next steps in onboarding.
The AI FDE Certification
Building Blocks
Hands-on learning with AI Makerspace follows these steps as the building blocks of a strong agentic and forward-deployed AI Engineering foundation. Our students find a lot of value working through challenges with our instructors, a community, and the feedback from other students.
All current curriculum in our course syllabus and code we teach here are always adapted to be current. We introduce best practices or tools where they're needed. Meaning, you're encouraged to bring what you're building at work.
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Module 01 — Neither product nor engineering alone is enough
FDEs bridge technical execution and real business needs.
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Module 02 — Why open weights matter and what that means for FDEs
Understand when and why open models matter in production.
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Module 03 — Retrieval vs. agentic search variants
Choose the right approach for finding and using information.
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Module 04 — Evals and the path to PoC
Demos with client-style critiques and agent architecture decisions
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Module 05 — Demos with client-style critiques and agent architecture decisions
Build, present, critique, and make better architecture decisions.
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Module 06 — Guardrails and adversaries
Design for safety, failure, and real-world misuse.
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Module 07 — Memory and harness engineering for long-running agents
Build agents that can work reliably over longer tasks.
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Module 08 — Fine-Tuning your LLMs and product
Know when and how to adapt models for specific needs.
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Module 09 — A Quick Break and US Holiday Pause
A brief pause before continuing the build.
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Module 10 — Infra, DevOps, MLOps, and deploying to someone else’s ecosystem
Get AI systems running inside your real technical environments.
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Module 11 — Production, or getting the AI inside of the company
Move from working prototype to a useful production system.
Student Dreams Achieved
and ROI Realized
Building, shipping, and sharing your solutions with a community goes the distance. See where some of our featured graduates land next and who drives a big impact in their organizations.
Juan Ovalle: Mistral AI
2023 Graduate, 2024–2026 Peer Supporter Landed a role on the Applied AI team at Mistral AI, crediting the program's mentors for the mindset and guidance that carried him there. And recently, Juan moved into a Forward-Deployed Engineer role at Google!
Arthi Kasturirangan: Informa
2024 Graduate, 2025 Peer Supporter Now VP of AI Engineering, building enterprise AI platforms and agentic systems. She was part of the team that shipped Elysia, Informa's internal AI system — a project championed by Informa's Chief AI & Innovation Officer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Onboarding
The AI Engineering Bootcamp teaches you technical skills around how to build AI applications from the ground up. It’s designed for people who want to develop practical AI engineering skills, understand the tools and patterns behind modern AI systems, and learn by building projects of their own.
The AI FDE Certification is for software engineers who are ready to apply those skills to real problems at work. It focuses on building AI within an organization’s existing systems, data, teams, and constraints, taking a use case from discovery and prototyping toward production.
In short, the Bootcamp helps you learn to build AI. The AI FDE Certification helps you build AI at work. It comes with the engineering judgment, collaboration, constraints, and problem-solving experience needed to deliver solutions in a real-world environment.
A standard macbook pro is recommended. 16 GB of VRAM or unified memory is the minimum recommended for the ability to run LLMs locally, safely, and privately. More VRAM can handle bigger models!
We recommend a visual Interactive Development Environment like Cursor, and setting this up is something that each person going through the training must do on your company hardware prior to kickoff
Because the AI advantage will not come from hiring a handful of AI experts, it will come from building AI capability across the teams already closest to the business.
The AI FDE Certification helps organizations turn experienced engineers into production-ready AI builders who can identify opportunities, design solutions, and ship real AI systems inside their existing environment.
Instead of creating dependency on outside vendors or a small group of specialists, companies develop internal AI champions like you who understand their systems, customers, and business goals.
Hardware Requirements and Time Commitment
A standard MacBook Pro is recommended. 16 GB of VRAM or unified memory is the minimum recommended for the ability to run LLMs locally, safely, and privately. More VRAM can handle bigger models!
The AI Engineering Certification is a 10-week-long program.
All training follows our process and proven curriculum using today's most important building blocks of AI Engineering.
Expect 3 hours in class (1 lecture, 2 hours working with one another and experts), and 1-5 hours of solo working.
This project, which is typically your first AI deployment with us, takes from 4-20 hours.
Total = 48-120 hours to build your AI foundation
AI Forward-Deployed Engineering Certification Payment Terms
Individual seats for this certification are $5,250, and teams are also welcome. A payment for each registrant and trainee is due upfront and in full to join the cohort and begin the certification and work.
The AI FDE Certification is run through Maven to keep all of your payments, content, training dates, and 1:1s in one place.
There are no discounts for returning graduates or students at this time, and you're welcome to come build your idea or a pilot for your employer with us. Ask us about a group discount if you're sending a larger team.
Security Concerns
Nearly every mid-market to enterprise AI conversation hits the same wall.
"We can't send our data to a third-party API or team."
But here's what you can do:
1. Run open-weight models locally, on hardware your enterprise already controls
2. Keep sensitive and private data inside your own environment
3. Generate synthetic data locally to prototype and backtest when the real data is off limits
4. Choose, host, and run models with best-practice tooling instead of guessing
This is all part of the skill set an AI FDE brings to a company. Finding the path that works inside the constraints, rather than waiting for the constraints to disappear.
We teach this track in week two of The Forward-Deployed Engineer: AI FDE Certification, where you set up local inference and generate synthetic data for prototyping, all on a real use case from your own job.
Production readiness is guaranteed. Security constraints in your organization are a nuanced thing, especially considering the emerging state of the off-the-shelf security of new tooling as it arises.
We are well-versed in working with enterprise clients, including in sensitive and highly-regulated industries. Although we would prefer to showcase you as a client, we will always respect your privacy publicly and flow down terms within your NDAs to our instructional staff internally.
Cohort begins soon, $5,250 per individual
Pre-Order the AI Engineering Bootcamp Book on Amazon Today
Note: The book is included with an enrollment in any AI Makerspace course. Start learning AI engineering here, or reinforce what you're building with our book.
The AI Engineering Bootcamp: Build, Ship, Share, brings you self-paced learning on how to build production AI.
Whether you're building your first AI application, getting promoted, or deploying enterprise AI systems in production, this book provides a solid roadmap for understanding, building, and improving modern AI solutions.
Launch Date: January 2027
Price: $65 USD
🏗️ Build. 🚢 Ship. 🚀 Share.
More Student Outcomes and Testimonials
"Amazing course that covers everything on AI Engineering -- from fundamentals to advanced topics. The course approaches AI Engineering through theory & practical with weekly tiered assignments (tier as in there is a basic homework & optional "advanced" homework if you want to stretch yourself). Additionally, the whole course is set up really well logistically, with multiple office hours covering different time slots in the week so students can be assured there's an office hours session they can drop by for help."
Senior Software Engineer at Visa
"A spectacular amount of information delivered in ten weeks. Lectures are extremely well prepared, and the combined expertise of Dr. Greg and The Whiz works magically. This is NOT an easy bootcamp unless you are already an AI engineer. But resources were plentiful, and our cohort developed a camaraderie and I believe some long lasting future friendships. Highly recommended."
Professor Emeritus, University of Utah School of Medicine
“AI Makerspace excels where others have come up short, empowering data scientists with the vital practical skills to flourish within the AI landscape. Through collaborations with industry trailblazers, they guarantee a concentration on the most pertinent and crucial expertise. They bring people up to speed on a subject that never slows down.”
Associate Director @ Berkeley Research Group
“The reactions from the team were overwhelmingly positive. They learned a lot and liked the way your Bootcamp is structured. Most importantly, they felt pride in completing the challenges… There was blood, sweat, and tears, but a huge sense of accomplishment! I will explore opportunities to work together in the future, so please keep me in the loop on what you’re building over there.”
AI & Data Tribe Director @ Hrvatski Telekom
"Hands down one of the best AI programs out there and truly one of the few that shows you how to *actually build* an AI-native product (i.e. not just string together a prototype using some prompt engineering and some off the shelf saas tools). Vibes for the live sessions are also fantastic!"
Founder and CEO of Dual Logic
“The AI Engineering bootcamp has significant advantages for enterprise data teams. After having multiple team members complete the bootcamp, our approach to Generative AI projects has become more streamlined and effective, leading to faster prototyping. I strongly recommend this course to any data professional or team eager to upgrade their Gen AI skills and drive impactful innovation within their organization.”
Sr. Director, Data Strategy @ Kiewit
“Greg and his team were able to make complex subject matter easy to digest and very engaging. In just a few weeks time we were able to complete widely divergent projects to develop AI apps to solve healthcare challenges.”
Healthcare Technology Manager @ VA Medical Center
Start a New Conversation with AI Makerspace
Let's get you on the right path!
Have a question about our AI FDE Certification? Book a call to talk with us and get started with a 1:1 walkthrough and onboarding.
For any other general inquiries, you can contact us, or send an email about what you're looking for to greg@aimakerspace.io.