Forward Deployed Engineering: The Complete Course

Discovery, messy data, integrations, LLM systems built with Claude, and production support — the full FDE playbook, taught through hands-on Python exercises you complete right in your browser.

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01
The FDE Role & Mindset
0/9 · 139 min
What forward deployed engineers actually do, how the role differs from SWE, solutions engineering and consulting, and the operating loop you'll run on every engagement.
02
Customer Discovery & Scoping
🔒0/12 · 227 min
Turn vague asks into scoped, measurable engagements: discovery calls, stakeholder maps, honest baselines, requirements extracted with Claude, and change requests handled without saying no.
03
Wrangling Messy Customer Data
🔒0/13 · 285 min
Customer data is never clean. Profile it, normalize it, reconcile systems of record, deduplicate entities, label free text with Claude cost-effectively, and report quality so problems get fixed at the source.
04
APIs & Integrations
🔒0/11 · 240 min
Connect to customer systems that paginate, rate-limit, time out and change without warning. Build clients, webhook receivers and sync jobs that survive production, and use Claude to speed up integration work safely.
05
SQL & Data Modeling on Customer Systems
🔒0/11 · 247 min
Query customer databases safely and fluently: answer executive questions, use window functions and cohorts, build a metrics layer, guard production data, and put Claude-powered text-to-SQL behind real guardrails.
06
Building with Claude: Anthropic SDK Fundamentals
🔒0/11 · 242 min
The core of modern FDE work: the Anthropic SDK in depth. Multi-turn state, production prompts with injection defenses, streaming, errors and refusals, prompt caching and real cost, and routing requests across models.
07
Tool Use, RAG & Agents
🔒0/9 · 219 min
Give Claude access to customer systems. Define strict tools, write a traced agent loop, answer from documents with checked citations, gate risky actions behind human approval, and know when not to build an agent.
08
Evals, Reliability & Cost
🔒0/11 · 259 min
Prove your LLM system works before the customer finds out it doesn't. Build eval harnesses, calibrate LLM judges, evaluate agent trajectories and retrieval, gate releases on regressions and noise, and model cost against quality.
09
Shipping to Production
🔒0/11 · 248 min
Deploy into environments you don't control. Map the customer's environment, validate config and protect secrets, log every Claude call safely, alert on what matters, degrade gracefully, debug an incident from logs alone, and hand off with runbooks and a blameless post-mortem.
10
Capstone: An End-to-End Engagement
🔒0/9 · 265 min
Run a full simulated engagement for NorthStar Logistics: scope from discovery notes and a measured baseline, clean and join their messy data, design and build a guarded exception-triage agent, evaluate it and make the ship call, then turn a pilot into fact-checked numbers for the executive readout.