AI Engineering Bootcamp
A live, build-first cohort where you design, evaluate and ship a production-grade AI product: retrieval, agents, evals, guardrails and deployment, reviewed by engineers who do this for clients every day.
- Format
- Live cohort
- Duration
- 6 weeks
- Commitment
- 6–8 hrs / week
- Level
- Intermediate
What you'll be able to do
- 01Design retrieval pipelines that actually find the right context: chunking, hybrid search and re-ranking
- 02Build tool-using agents with Claude and MCP that recover from their own mistakes
- 03Write evals that catch regressions before your users do
- 04Ship to production with tracing, cost controls and guardrails
- 05Present a capstone you can show in interviews or to your board
Who this course is for
- Software engineers
- You can write Python and ship APIs. You want to be the person on your team who owns the AI roadmap.
- Data scientists & ML engineers
- You know models. You want to ship LLM products end-to-end, not just notebooks.
- Technical founders
- You need an AI feature in production this quarter and want to build it yourself, properly.
Course syllabus
6 modules-
Week 1 Life as an AI engineer
- The LLM application stack in 2027
- Prompting as interface design
- Structured outputs & tool calling
- Cost, latency and model selection
BUILDShip a structured-extraction API
-
Week 2 Retrieval that works
- Chunking strategies that respect meaning
- Embeddings, hybrid search & re-ranking
- Contextual retrieval
- When not to use RAG
BUILDKnowledge-base assistant over your own docs
-
Week 3 Evals before vibes
- Building golden datasets
- LLM-as-judge done properly
- Regression suites in CI
- Error analysis loops
BUILDEval harness for your week-2 assistant
-
Week 4 Agents & the agent harness
- Tool design and MCP servers
- Planning, memory and recovery
- Agentic search
- Human-in-the-loop patterns
BUILDA research agent with its own MCP tools
-
Week 5 Production & LLMOps
- Tracing and observability
- Guardrails and prompt-injection defence
- Caching, batching and cost control
- Deploying on serverless and containers
BUILDDeploy with tracing + guardrails
-
Week 6 Capstone demo day
- Scope, build, measure
- Writing a technical case study
- Demo day with peer & instructor review
BUILDCapstone: your own AI product
Before you start
- Comfortable with Python
- Git and the command line
- An Anthropic or OpenAI API key (~£20 of credits)
Who teaches it
Senior AI engineers and consultants from IT Expert Consultancy Services Ltd, who design and ship LLM systems for clients. You learn the patterns they use on real projects, and get your code reviewed by them every week.
What learners say
“The evals week alone paid for the course. We caught a retrieval regression the day before a client demo.”
“Finally a course that treats agents as software, not magic. My capstone became our first production AI feature.”
“Small cohort, real code review, instructors who actually ship. Completely different from video courses.”
Frequently asked questions
How technical is this course?
You'll write real Python every week. If you can build a small Flask or FastAPI app, you're ready. We don't assume prior ML experience.
Which models and tools do we use?
Primarily Claude and open-weight models, with patterns that transfer to any provider. Tooling includes MCP, vector databases, evals frameworks and standard observability stacks.
What if I miss a live session?
Every session is recorded and posted within a few hours. Office hours run twice a week across UK and US-friendly times, so you can catch up and still get your code reviewed.
Is there a refund policy?
Yes. Attend the first week; if the course isn't right for you, email us before the second live session for a full refund. No forms, no questions.
Can my employer pay?
Yes. We invoice through IT Expert Consultancy Services Ltd and can accept purchase orders. Most learners expense the course against their L&D budget. Contact us for a letter you can send to your manager.
Do I keep access after the cohort ends?
You keep lifetime access to recordings, code, slides and future updates to the course material, plus the alumni community.
£1,195
Starts 12 Jan 2027