Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) are the engineers an AI company sends to its clients. They sit with the customer, find the real problem, build the AI solution inside the client's own systems, and stay until it works in production. Palantir made the title known; today AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Scale AI hire FDEs, and their job posts ask for very similar skills. This bootcamp teaches those skills by doing one complete engagement, from the first client conversation to go-live and handover.

You are the FDE. The client is DemoStore, an online electronics shop that asks for "a chatbot like everyone has". You turn that vague request into a measurable problem, then build an agentic AI support assistant with Claude, connect it to the client's real systems, prove it with evals, and launch it to production on AWS.

What you will do, step by step:

• FDE role and customer engagement: discovery sessions, stakeholders, scoping an ambiguous request, a problem statement and requirements with success criteria in numbers.
• Applied AI and agentic AI: LLM basics, prompts, structured output, comparing Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus on labeled data, an AI agent loop with tools and safety rules written from scratch, RAG with sources, document extraction, simulated customers and evals over several runs.
• Rapid prototyping and full-stack: Python, FastAPI and Pydantic for the chat service, TypeScript and React for the widget, REST APIs, and Claude Code as your AI coding agent, with plans, reviews and tests.
• Data integration and pipelines: SQL on an Oracle ERP with no API, a middleware API, a help desk API with pagination and retries, a nightly CSV over SFTP, cleaning data with pandas, data modeling and quality checks.
• Production readiness: identity checks, money and refunds handled in code, privacy and compliance, Docker, CI/CD with an eval gate in GitHub Actions, AWS deployment, observability, shadow mode, a 5 % launch with a control group and a kill switch.
• Communication and customer success: status updates, hard conversations, a recorded demo, roadmaps and user stories, customer success metrics, a runbook and a handover.

Most hands-on lessons come with a Udemy lab, so you can practice in your browser with nothing to install and no API key, where your Udemy plan includes labs. You can also install the project on your own computer and run it with the real Claude.

Real failures happen on screen and are fixed on screen, because that is the job. The course ends with an interview-style take-home, a system design interview walkthrough, and a project you can show and discuss in FDE and AI engineer interviews.

Who this is for: software engineers, AI engineers, DevOps engineers and product managers who want to move into a Forward Deployed Engineer or applied AI role. It starts from the basics and explains every new term when it first appears. Non-developers can skip the coding labs and follow the decisions and demos.

Your instructor is an AI architect with more than 15 years in IT who builds AI solutions for large enterprise clients and holds all four Claude certifications.

The course has about 15 hours of short video lessons in 11 days (one section per day of the engagement), 5 quizzes and 2 role-play conversations.