Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE): Applied AI Delivery

Turn an AI-assisted workflow into a testable, permission-aware service with explicit human approval, dependable integrations and an operational handoff.

What you'll be able to do

  • Translate an ambiguous assistant request into measurable acceptance criteria.
  • Validate API contracts and make retry behavior explicit.
  • Separate configuration, secrets and deployment trust boundaries.
  • Filter document evidence by the requesting user's permissions.
  • Persist approved workflow states and handle stale approvals.
  • Adapt legacy responses without trusting unverified identity claims.
  • Evaluate service reliability and assemble an actionable handoff.

Before you start

  • Write small Python functions and read JSON payloads.
  • Understand HTTP requests, responses and basic authentication concepts.
  • Run Python 3.12 or newer locally; all core labs use the standard library and synthetic data.

The curriculum

  1. Turn a Request into a Delivery Contract — Free preview

    Define permitted actions, exclusions and evidence for a successful release.

  2. Build an API Contract That Can Fail Clearly — Free preview

    Make validation, error responses and retry expectations explicit before connecting a model or an external ticket system.

  3. Package the Runtime and Its Trust Boundaries — Sign-in access

    Keep configuration reproducible, secrets out of artifacts and cloud permissions narrower than the service's code surface.

  4. Retrieve Only Evidence the Requester May Read — Sign-in access

    Filter evidence before selection and cite only authorized material.

  5. Make Approval a Durable State, Not a Button — Free preview

    Bind a review decision to an exact draft revision and reject stale actions after edits or concurrent changes.

  6. Bridge Identity and Legacy Systems Without Borrowing Trust — Sign-in access

    Translate older system formats through a narrow adapter while keeping identity, access and status semantics explicit.

  7. Measure the Service and Rehearse Recovery — Sign-in access

    Define meaningful success metrics, inspect tail latency and create a failure drill that produces a usable operator handoff.

  8. Assemble Relay Room and Defend the Release — Sign-in access

    Integrate the course boundaries into a local portfolio project and present evidence without overstating production readiness.

Relay Room

Build a local facilities service-request assistant for fictional shared offices. It helps staff draft requests about furniture, cleaning and presentation equipment using permitted policy notes. A human reviews the precise draft before a simulated ticket is created. Emergency response, autonomous purchasing and production identity integration are outside the project scope.

Deliverables

  • A runnable standard-library Python reference workflow and synthetic fixtures.
  • An acceptance matrix and API contract tests.
  • A permission-filtered document lookup and trusted identity adapter.
  • A persistent approval ledger with a fake idempotent ticket adapter.
  • A small reliability report, failure drill and operator handoff.

Review your work

  • Unauthorized documents never appear in a response or model-facing context.
  • A changed draft invalidates its previous approval.
  • A retry of an approved operation produces one simulated ticket.
  • Malformed upstream data is rejected without exposing internal details.
  • The demo runs locally without real employee data, paid APIs or cloud accounts.