Generative AI Application Engineer

Learn to choose a useful AI surface before choosing a model.

• Model capabilities, limits, and task decomposition
• Use-case framing, workflow mapping, and human handoffs
• Product success metrics for quality, speed, and usefulness

Deliverable: an application brief with user need, workflow, risk notes, and measurable success criteria.

Turn model calls into predictable, versioned application components.

• Messages, structured outputs, tool calling, and schema design
• Prompt and version management with useful test cases
• Failure handling, retries, fallbacks, and secret boundaries

Deliverable: a reliable extraction service with typed outputs and failure cases documented.

Give a model the right context and make its evidence inspectable.

• Embeddings, chunking, metadata, and vector search
• Reranking, citations, freshness, and update strategies
• Grounding behavior and what to do when context is missing

Deliverable: a cited knowledge assistant with a small evaluation set and freshness note.

Replace vibes with a repeatable way to see whether the application is improving.

• Test datasets, rubrics, and model-assisted grading
• Hallucination analysis, error taxonomies, and regression checks
• Latency, token, cost, and trace interpretation

Deliverable: an evaluation dashboard and release gate for a defined quality bar.

Make an AI feature feel coherent, accessible, and honest inside a product.

• Streaming UI, state, feedback, and recoverable errors
• Guardrails, accessibility, and clear uncertainty language
• Backend secrets, request boundaries, and safe tool exposure

Deliverable: a polished multi-turn web app with a short product decision log.

Prepare a useful system for real constraints without pretending risk is gone.

• Caching, rate limits, fallbacks, privacy, and monitoring
• Deployment choices, incident notes, and cost boundaries
• Case-study writing: problem, approach, evidence, and tradeoffs

Capstone: a production-ready domain assistant with evaluation gate, runbook, and portfolio case study.