As technical practitioners move into senior, staff, or principal roles, they frequently face a hidden career bottleneck: the number of people inside their organization who can meaningfully challenge their reasoning gets smaller.
InfoQ's online certification cohorts are built around that gap: small groups of senior engineers from different companies and industries, working through real decisions together, in confidence.
InfoQ has launched the InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program, an online cohort with live sessions, 4 hours a week, for 5 weeks, for senior engineers, software architects, AI/ML platform engineers, technical leads, and engineering managers working on production AI systems. The first cohort begins on July 25, 2026, with weekly live sessions on Saturdays at 9:00 AM PDT.
The program is facilitated by Hien Luu, Sr. Engineering Manager at Zoox and author of MLOps with Ray and Beginning Apache Spark 3. Luu leads the Machine Learning Platform team at Zoox and has presented at QCon conferences on AI/ML infrastructure and production engineering.
"Most teams are making infrastructure, platform, and reliability decisions for production AI systems before they have strong internal benchmarks for what good looks like. The cohort gives senior engineers a way to apply proven frameworks to their own work, with experienced peers from other organizations challenging their assumptions and trade-offs."
— Hien Luu, InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Cohort facilitator
From AI Prototypes to Production Systems
As teams move AI features from prototype to production, the core engineering questions shift. The challenge is no longer just whether a system can work once, but whether it can keep working predictably under production constraints and at scale.
For many teams, the calls around retrieval architecture, context pipelines, agent orchestration, evaluation, platform boundaries, inference cost, observability, and operational ownership are being made for the first time, with few people outside the team to compare notes with.
In each cohort, senior engineers from different companies apply proven frameworks to the AI engineering decisions they are working on, and share what worked and what did not, in confidence. Participants leave with either new approaches or confirmation that the calls they are already making are the right ones.
Sessions are kept small and run as confidential peer groups, allowing participants to examine architectural decisions, technical debt, and organizational constraints in a closed setting.
The Curriculum
Each week, join a four-hour live online session with the facilitator and a small cohort of peers. The live sessions focus on applying frameworks to real problems from participants’ own work rather than working through generic case studies.
- Week 1: Becoming an AI-Native Engineering Team. Participants examine where AI changes engineering habits, product thinking, and architectural trade-offs, and where existing resilience and risk-management practices still apply.
- Week 2: Designing and Building RAG and Context Pipelines. Retrieval architectures, knowledge graphs, and memory pipelines that remain grounded as data changes and query complexity increase.
- Week 3: Designing and Building AI Agents. Single-purpose tools through to multi-agent orchestration, with a focus on the tradeoffs between autonomy and control in production systems.
- Week 4: AI Platforms and Infrastructure. Platform layer design for AI systems: what to centralize, what to federate, and how to route batch and real-time workloads without overspending on inference.
- Week 5: AI Operational Excellence: Evals, Trust, and Reliability. Evaluation frameworks and operational disciplines that keep AI systems dependable after deployment.
Throughout the cohort, participants develop a technical capstone article. Week 5 includes cohort presentations of the article drafts. The strongest pieces are published on InfoQ. Graduates earn the InfoQ Certified AI Engineering Program certification, which can be added to their LinkedIn profile.
Upcoming online cohorts and certifications
- The Software Architecture cohort starts June 10, 2026. Reserve a place now.
- The Organizational Architect cohort starts June 19, 2026. Reserve a place now.
- The AI Engineering cohort starts on July 25, 2026. Reserve a place now.
Most companies reimburse professional development. A Convince Your Boss template is available, laying out the business case for your manager.
More details and enrollment for all three programs are available at the InfoQ Online Certification Program page.