Finguard AI Engineering · building track

Stop prototyping. Ship AI features.

A hands-on, production-focused course on building software with large language models — prompting and structured outputs, retrieval (RAG), agents and tools, evaluation and observability, guardrails, and the cost and latency work that separates a demo from a product.

12
sections
~60
units
Practical
for engineers
Interactive figure · token cost
Estimated monthly cost$0
Illustrative mid-tier pricing. Output tokens cost more than input.

A real tool from the course. Drag the sliders.

A working demo is the easy 80%. The last 20% — reliability, evals, cost, safety — is the actual job.

This course is about that 20%. It assumes you can already get a model to answer; it teaches you to make it answer correctly, cheaply, safely, and the same way every time — at production scale.

What you'll learn

From prompt to production.

01

Prompt & structure

Reliable prompting, few-shot and reasoning techniques, and structured outputs (JSON and schemas) you can actually parse and trust in code.

02

Ground & extend

Retrieval-augmented generation, tool and function calling, and agents — connecting a model to your data and letting it act.

03

Ship reliably

Evaluation and observability, guardrails and security, and the cost, latency, and architecture work that makes an AI feature production-ready.

The curriculum

Twelve sections, end to end.

The first two sections are live now; the rest are being written and appear in your dashboard as they ship.

01
Foundations of AI Engineering
The discipline, the LLM as a component, the app stack, choosing a model, and tokens, context & cost (with a live cost calculator).
Available now
02
Prompt Engineering in Depth
Prompt anatomy and templates, few-shot, reasoning (chain-of-thought, self-consistency), structured JSON outputs, and defensive prompting.
Available now
03
Tool Use & Function Calling
Function calling, designing good tools, multi-tool orchestration, code execution, and connecting to systems (MCP, APIs).
Coming soon
04
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Chunking, embeddings, vector databases, hybrid search and reranking, advanced RAG, and how to evaluate it.
Coming soon
05
Agents
The agent loop, tools and environments, memory, planning, multi-agent systems, and reliability at long horizons.
Coming soon
06
Orchestration & Workflows
Chaining, routing and fallbacks, frameworks, streaming and async, and caching.
Coming soon
07
Fine-Tuning & Customization
When to fine-tune vs prompt vs RAG, data, LoRA/QLoRA, preference tuning, and serving custom models.
Coming soon
08
Evaluation & Observability
Why eval is the job, building eval sets, LLM-as-judge, online eval, tracing, and production monitoring.
Coming soon
09
Guardrails, Safety & Security
Input/output guardrails, prompt injection defense, PII and privacy, moderation, and compliance.
Coming soon
10
Performance, Cost & Latency
Latency, throughput and batching, cost engineering, semantic caching, and right-sizing models.
Coming soon
11
Production Architecture
Reference architectures, model gateways, versioning prompts and models, CI/CD with evals, and reliability patterns.
Coming soon
12
Capstones & Case Studies
Design a grounded assistant, a reliable agent, and an extraction pipeline — then productionize, and the road ahead.
Coming soon
Before you start

You should be able to code.

This is a builder's course. You don't need to train models, but you should be comfortable writing software and calling an API. Curious how the models themselves work? The Finguard LLMs course pairs perfectly with this one.

Who it's for

Software engineers adding AI Full-stack & backend devs Founders & technical PMs ML folks moving to production
Begin

Build something that ships.

No account, no install. Progress saves automatically in your browser, separate from your other courses.