Software Engineer

AI Engineer

10–12 weeks

For software engineers who already have solid system design, debugging and production experience. This program focuses squarely on the specific skills that separate a general software engineer from an AI Engineer — not a full software engineering curriculum from scratch.

Curriculum

How the program is structured

  1. Foundations

    LLM engineering fundamentals — prompting, context design and working with model APIs.

  2. Retrieval & Grounding

    RAG architecture, vector search and retrieval quality evaluation.

  3. Agents & Orchestration

    Tool-calling patterns, multi-step planning and designing for graceful failure.

  4. Evaluation & Production

    AI evaluation methodology, deployment patterns and monitoring for AI systems.

  5. Capstone & Verification

    Build a practical project end-to-end and complete the role-specific technical assessment.

What you'll learn and who this is for

Full Skill List

LLM EngineeringRAGAI AgentsAI EvaluationPrompt EngineeringVector DatabasesAI System Design

Prerequisites

Comfortable writing production code and reasoning about system design. No prior AI experience required.

By the end, you'll be able to

  • Design and build LLM-powered features using retrieval-augmented generation.
  • Build tool-using AI agents that handle multi-step tasks and realistic failure cases.
  • Write evaluation suites that catch quality regressions before users do.
  • Talk through the production tradeoffs — cost, latency, reliability — of AI systems in an interview.

Who this program is for

  • Software engineers with production experience who want to move into AI Engineer roles.
  • Engineers comfortable with system design and debugging complex systems.
  • Not intended as a first introduction to programming or software engineering fundamentals.

Projects, assessment and verification

Practical Projects

  • AI Research Agent
  • Enterprise RAG Assistant

Assessment

Role-specific technical assessment covering LLM engineering, agent design and evaluation methodology.

Verification

Verified ITtoAI profile with assessed skills and reviewed project submissions.

Career Relevance

Maps directly to AI Engineer hiring requirements — tool-using agents, retrieval systems and evaluation rigor.

Completing this program does not guarantee employment, placement or salary outcomes. It builds practical capability and an evidence-based profile that demonstrates it.