Question 1

What will I actually learn in this course?

Accepted Answer

This course teaches you to build production AI systems end-to-end. You learn the full AI engineering stack: LLM fundamentals, data ingestion, chunking strategies, embedding models, vector databases, hybrid search, reranking, evaluation frameworks (RAGAS, DeepEval, LLM-as-Judge), semantic caching, AI systems API design, AI observability and trace management, Docker deployment, and agentic systems. RAG is one of the core skills at the center of it. Every part has a hands-on project on your own data, and you finish by building and shipping a full capstone that earns you a certificate.

Question 2

What is RAG?

Accepted Answer

RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is how you make AI work with your own data. LLMs on their own can't access your private documents, internal databases, or real-time information. RAG solves this by retrieving relevant information from your data sources and feeding it to the model at the time of the query. This is the pattern behind every production AI application: customer support bots, code assistants, enterprise knowledge systems, copilots.

Question 3

Do I need prior AI or ML experience?

Accepted Answer

No. The course starts from first principles: how LLMs work under the hood, pre-training, tokenization, attention mechanisms, and post-training, then builds up from there. Nearly a third of students started as complete AI beginners, while others had already built LLM-powered applications and came for production-scale rigor. The real prerequisite is engineering maturity: reading documentation, debugging systems, and thinking about tradeoffs. If you've shipped production software, you have what it takes.

Question 4

Who is this course built for?

Accepted Answer

This course is built for software engineers with production experience who want to build AI engineering skills. You should be comfortable writing and debugging code. It uses Python, but most engineers can cross-apply from any language, and no AI or ML experience is needed. More than 100 engineers have taken it, nearly 80% with 5+ years of experience and the majority with more than a decade, from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Adobe, Shopify, Citi, IBM, Docusign, Oracle, JPMorgan Chase, Autodesk, and Twitch.

Question 5

What makes this different from other AI courses?

Accepted Answer

Four things. You build decision frameworks, not just techniques, with a methodology for choosing the right approach for your data. Evaluation is a first-class citizen, with an entire section devoted to golden datasets, LLM-as-Judge pipelines, and triangulating across independent methods. Every project is on your own data. And your capstone is graded with detailed feedback, personally by Shivani in the cohort. It's the kind of project engineers put straight into interviews and stakeholder conversations.

Question 6

How much time per week does this take?

Accepted Answer

It depends on the format. The cohort runs 10 weeks; plan for roughly 10-14 hours a week. Its core modules are pre-recorded, so you watch them on your own time each week, while live office hours give real-time support. Self-Paced has no weekly commitment at all: 45+ hours of on-demand content plus labs and a capstone, and you move at your own pace with lifetime access.

You're all set!