DesireWhat you hold at the end of the LLM engineering certification
A course records that you watched. This records that your work changed. Imagine handing your engineering manager an evaluation report and a rollout plan instead of a demo. These are the artefacts the stage list produces, each one from your own capstone system.
A retrieval design chosen by measurement
At least three chunking configurations compared on the same question set by recall@k and context cost, with the choice and its reason written down, including the case where they are within noise and you chose the cheapest.
An agent with guardrails and an injection test you ran
An agent loop with tool schemas, defined tool-failure and termination behaviour, a guardrail layer, and a table of at least eight prompt-injection attacks against your own system with what changed as a result.
An evaluation report against a golden set you grew
Sixty or more questions with their growth story, retrieval and answer metrics reported separately, evidence that any LLM-as-judge agrees with your own labels, and an error analysis that names failure classes.
A production pack
A system that starts with one command, a latency measurement under a stated load, a cost model in rupees, a caching decision either way, structured traces, prompt and model versioning, and a rollback story.
A governance pack an auditor can read
A model card for the system, a data-flow and residency note, PII handling, an audit trail, retention, an incident runbook with one worked incident, and a human-oversight statement.
A deployed or deployable capstone
Your system with an 8 to 12 page report, double-marked on five criteria. A third marker is brought in when the two markers disagree on the result.
A viva on record
Thirty minutes with two evaluators: you walk through the system, answer questions on it, and say what you would change and why. Both evaluators must agree that it meets the standard.
The Certified AI/ML Specialist credential
Issued when the exam, the capstone and the viva are all passed. It is verifiable, is also issued as an Open Badge 2.0, and is followed by a re-sit of the diagnostic at 90 days.