Staging environment

Build Your AI Portfolio: Land AI Engineer, FDE and AI PM Roles

Dr. Aki Wijesundara

PhD in ML | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Manu Jayawardana

Exited AI Founder | Founder, TAI Labs

Ship three production-grade AI projects with evals and a story in 3 weeks.

You’ve done the courses. You’ve built the RAG chatbot. But when a hiring manager opens your GitHub, nothing proves you can take a messy real problem to something reliable, measured and explainable. That is what AI Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer and AI PM interviews screen for, and demos don’t show it.

In 3 weeks you’ll fix that. You’ll pick a realistic business problem, build an agentic system around it with Claude Code, prove it works with a proper eval report, and package it into a portfolio piece written for the role you want.

  • Week 1: scope a real problem and ship a working v1

  • Week 2: build a golden set, a failure taxonomy and before/after numbers

  • Week 3: public repo, demo video, case study, demo day with a hiring panel

One core build, three role tracks. AI Engineers leave with an eval harness and architecture record. FDEs leave with a discovery doc and deployment plan. AI PMs leave with a PRD and metrics plan.

TAI courses are built and taught by practitioners who ship agentic systems for real clients every week. 10,000+ professionals trained. Alumni from OpenAI, Google, Meta, McKinsey and BCG.

The app is the evidence. The proof is the product.

What you’ll learn

Practice the three skills that make senior people listen: a sharp narrative, command of the room, and composure under pressure.

  • Pick from 10 realistic business problems with datasets, or bring a real client workflow

  • Write a one-page brief with a named user, the workflow today and a success metric

  • Scope it so an interviewer can grasp it in 5 minutes

  • Go from a one-page brief to a working v1 in one week

  • Make the calls that matter: what to build, what to cut, what ships

  • One working v1 shipped by the end of week one

  • Build a golden set of 30+ cases including edge cases and adversarial inputs

  • Categorise every failure and fix the top three, with before/after pass rates

  • Measure cost and latency per request like a production team

  • Public repo with a README a hiring manager can read in 3 minutes

  • 3-minute demo video and a one-page case study written for your target role

  • Map every artefact to the interview questions it lets you answer

  • AI Engineer: architecture decision record and eval harness

  • FDE: customer discovery doc and deployment plan

  • AI PM: PRD, metrics plan and launch criteria

  • 5-minute presentation followed by interview-style questions from working hiring managers

  • Best projects get featured across TAI channels

Learn directly from Aki & Manu

Dr. Aki Wijesundara

Dr. Aki Wijesundara

AI Founder | Educator | Google AI Accelerator Alum

Google
Meta
Amazon Web Services
OpenAI
NVIDIA
Manu Jayawardana

Manu Jayawardana

AI Advisor | Founder, TAI Labs

Previous Students from
OpenAI
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
NVIDIA
Google
McKinsey & Company
See all products from TAI Labs

Who this course is for

  • The Engineer moving into AI. Has done a bootcamp or two. Needs proof of production judgment, not another demo.

  • The aspiring Forward Deployed Engineer. Can build, but has no customer-facing deployment story to tell in interviews

  • The PM targeting AI roles. Expected to spec and evaluate AI features. Needs a shipped example with real metrics

Prerequisites

  • One AI course or bootcamp completed

    You should have built at least one LLMpowered project before. This course is about proof, not first steps

  • Comfortable with Python or TypeScript, or driving Claude Code

    Engineers write code. PMs spec and drive a Claude Code build. Either path works, but you must be able to run a project locally.

  • A GitHub account and an Anthropic API key

    You'll need both before Session 1. Setup takes about 15 minutes, and course-wide API costs run a few dollars.

What's included

Live sessions

Learn directly from Dr. Aki Wijesundara & Manu Jayawardana in a real-time, interactive format.

Weekly Schedule

One 90-minute lesson a week, Thursdays, plus a weekly Tuesday office hour. Recorded if you miss one.

Demo Day

Present your project to Aki and field interview-style questions.

Lifetime access

Every recording, repo, dataset and template, yours forever. Rejoin any future cohort as tools change.

Certificate of completion

Shareable proof you shipped an evaluated, interview-ready AI project.

Maven Guarantee

Your purchase is backed by the Maven Guarantee.

Course syllabus

5 live sessions • 3 lessons • 3 projects

Week 1

Oct 15—Oct 18

    Scope and build

    2 items

    Oct

    15

    LIVE Session: Scope and build

    Thu 10/158:00 PM—9:30 PM (UTC)

Week 2

Oct 19—Oct 25

    Oct

    20

    Optional: Office Hours 1

    Tue 10/209:00 PM—10:00 PM (UTC)
    Optional

    Oct

    22

    LIVE Session: Prove it works

    Thu 10/228:00 PM—9:30 PM (UTC)

    Prove it works

    2 items

Free resources

Schedule

Live sessions

3 hrs / week

One 90-minute lesson a week, Thursdays, plus a weekly Tuesday office hour. Recorded if you miss one.

    • Thu, Oct 15

      8:00 PM—9:30 PM (UTC)

    • Tue, Oct 20

      9:00 PM—10:00 PM (UTC)

    • Thu, Oct 22

      8:00 PM—9:30 PM (UTC)

Projects

2 hrs / week

One project, shipped in three stages: working v1 by Friday of Week 1, eval report by Friday of Week 2, full portfolio piece and LinkedIn post by demo day

Async content

1 hr / week

Pre-work video on what hiring managers look at, the scoring rubric, and asynchronous brief review before Session 1 so you arrive ready to build

Testimonials

  • The AI training approach is outstanding. Our team learned to build practical AI solutions that we could implement immediately in our educational platform. The hands-on methodology made complex AI concepts accessible to our entire development team.
    Testimonial author image

    Kavi T.

    CEO of Tilli Kids / Stanford PhD
  • Not only are the instructors experts in their field, they're incredibly skilled at breaking down complicated AI concepts so students can grasp them quickly. Anyone interested in building foundational AI knowledge should take this training - it's worth the investment.
    Testimonial author image

    Dr. Elizabeth Creighton

    Founder & Principal at Brazen
  • The instructors help break down AI model development and clearly have plenty of experience to help others learn about complex concepts like infrastructure setup. The practical approach to NLP and LLM applications was exactly what our team needed.
    Testimonial author image

    Alissa Valentine

    NLP & LLM Real World Data Scientist
  • I sent my team through this training for upskilling, and the results have been remarkable. Within weeks, they became much more efficient at building automations and deploying AI agents at work. This program bridges the gap between theory and practice and it’s had a real impact on our productivity.
    Testimonial author image

    Aamir Faaiz

    CEO of Bayseian

Hear It From Our Students

Learning AI Made Simple | Student Feedback on Our AI Engineering Bootcamp | TAI

Who You'll Be Learning From

Learn from Aki & Manu. Previous students are from top companies like Google, Meta & OpenAI.

Here’s what our cohort members are saying

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Frequently asked questions

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