Pathway 01 / Build
Generative AI Application Engineer
Start with the product, retrieval, evaluation, and application layer your platform will serve.
Explore generative AI →Career pathway / Production systems
Build the pipelines, release paths, and reliability practices that make AI useful after the demo.

The study plan
Understand the lifecycle and constraints before choosing platform machinery.
Deliverable: a platform design document with boundaries, ownership, and operating assumptions.
Make training inputs and outputs inspectable, repeatable, and attributable.
Deliverable: a repeatable training pipeline with validation checks and lineage notes.
Turn a model artifact into a release path that another engineer can operate.
Deliverable: an automated model release with deployment notes and a rollback procedure.
Give operators enough signal to see when the system or its data has changed.
Deliverable: a monitoring dashboard and runbook for a defined production service.
Apply platform judgment to newer model workloads and their cost profile.
Deliverable: a governed LLM release pipeline with evaluation and cost gates.
Design the golden path that lets a team move faster without erasing its boundaries.
Capstone: a production AI platform reference implementation with golden path, SLOs, security notes, and operator runbook.
By the end
You will be able to design a path from data to service, name the operational signals that matter, and make a release safer to change.
Capture versions, lineage, environments, and checks so a run can be understood later.
Package deployments with gates, rollback paths, and enough context for an operator.
Pair service health with data quality, drift, model quality, and meaningful SLOs.
Make a secure, documented route to production that teams can use without guesswork.
“My capstone finally made the invisible work legible: ownership, rollback, and what happens on a bad day.”
Mentor profile
Platform engineering lead focused on reproducibility, developer experience, and the careful operational work between a model and a service.
Before you begin
No. The pathway introduces the relevant platform concepts while expecting comfort with Python, Git, and basic software delivery. You will practice reasoning about infrastructure without tying the work to one provider.
The work produces a production-shaped reference implementation and release artifacts. The storefront does not promise a specific cloud environment, hosting account, or production workload.
Related pathways
Pathway 01 / Build
Start with the product, retrieval, evaluation, and application layer your platform will serve.
Explore generative AI →Pathway 03 / Discover
Understand the data and modeling workflows that production systems need to support.
Explore data science →