About FDE@ProdAI
We train Forward Deployed Engineers
who own AI in production.
FDE stands for Forward Deployed Engineer — the engineer who doesn't just build AI prototypes, but ships, operates, and improves them in production. ProdAI is the training program that creates them.
The Definition
What is a Forward Deployed Engineer?
A Forward Deployed Engineer is a technical operator who sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and deployment. Originating at firms like Palantir, the FDE model means being embedded directly with the problem — not building from a distance.
In the AI era, an FDE owns the full lifecycle: designing the system, integrating LLMs and RAG pipelines, deploying to production infrastructure, monitoring for failures, and iterating fast. They are not AI researchers. They are AI engineers who ship.
How We Teach
Four pillars of the ProdAI method
Forward Deployed
FDE engineers don't sit behind dashboards. They embed with teams, own systems end-to-end, and ship AI that runs in production — not in notebooks.
Built on Real Failure
Every module is taught through production incidents, post-mortems, and real breakage. If it hasn't failed in prod, we don't teach it as a pattern.
Outcome-Driven
The goal isn't a certificate. It's the ability to walk into any AI engineering role and immediately close the gap between prototype and production.
Cohort-Based
Small cohorts. Live sessions. Peer reviews. You learn alongside engineers at the same inflection point — not through pre-recorded videos alone.
Curriculum
The full production AI stack
LLM Engineering
Tokenization, context windows, prompt engineering, structured outputs
RAG Systems
Chunking, embeddings, retrieval pipelines, reranking, hybrid search
Knowledge Graphs
Graph-RAG, entity extraction, Neo4j, production knowledge stores
AI Agents
Tool use, orchestration, memory, multi-agent systems
Fine-Tuning
LoRA, QLoRA, evaluation, dataset curation, deployment
MLOps
Inference servers, observability, CI/CD for models, cost management
Ready to become an FDE?
Cohort 3 is forming now. Small group, live instruction, real production projects.
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