Engineer the Future: Build production-ready AI solutions
6 - 9 months
9687563
This Program is Perfect For
- People who are passionate about meeting the increasing demand for AI-expertise
- Technology pioneers interested in boosting their productivity
- IT professionals, software engineers, data and systems engineers, and technical team members who need to introduce, build, or support generative AI capabilities within their organizations—from small businesses to large enterprises.
A focused path to build enterprise-ready AI solutions
Your organization looks to you for practical, production-ready AI solutions.
As companies adopt generative AI to automate processes and drive business impact, IT professionals and software engineers are increasingly expected to deliver scalable, reliable, and secure AI applications. This AI Engineer specialization equips you with the skills to design, build, deploy, and maintain real-world solutions powered by large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and AI agents.
You’ll learn to integrate AI into workflows, automate tasks, analyze and summarize data, and build applications that deliver measurable value—from customer support automation and feedback analysis to research acceleration and workflow optimization. Emphasis is placed on industry-relevant practices such as prompt engineering, vector database integration for RAG, context engineering, LLM application monitoring and evaluation, and AI safety guardrails for responsible deployment.
Through hands-on, project-based courses, you'll create deployable, maintainable AI solutions ready for use across the organization. Lead the change in any department—from marketing and HR, to customer service, and R&D.
Learning outcomes
After completing the AI Engineer specialization students should be able to:
- Explain the architecture and functionality of LLMs, including transformer architecture, embeddings, pre-training and next token generation.
- Develop, deploy, and integrate LLM-powered applications using APIs and frameworks like LangChain for tasks such as customer support, productivity, and feedback analysis.
- Design and implement RAG-based applications to retrieve, summarize, and contextualize internal knowledge while evaluating performance with standard metrics.
- Build AI agents capable of reasoning, planning, automating workflows, and integrating with tools, APIs, and data systems for business applications.
- Evaluate, monitor, and improve generative AI systems using best practices, ensuring ethical, secure, and responsible deployment.
Courses
Program Requirements
Total: 3 courses (6 quarter units)
- End with specialization completion review.
1. Required Courses:
Currently no classes scheduled. Would you like to be notified when a class is available?
Currently no classes scheduled. Would you like to be notified when a class is available?
Spring
AISV.820
$650
Apr. 4 - May. 30, Saturday, 9:00am - 12:00pm
- Flexible Attend in person or via Zoom at scheduled times.
AISV.820.(1)
Schedule
| Date | Start Time | End Time | Meeting Type | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sat, 04-04-2026 | 9:00am | 12:00pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Sat, 04-11-2026 | 9:00am | 12:00pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Sat, 04-18-2026 | 9:00am | 12:00pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Sat, 04-25-2026 | 9:00am | 12:00pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Sat, 05-02-2026 | 9:00am | 12:00pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Sat, 05-09-2026 | 9:00am | 12:00pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Sat, 05-16-2026 | 9:00am | 12:00pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Sat, 05-30-2026 | 9:00am | 12:00pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
This class meets simultaneously in a classroom and remotely via Zoom. Students are expected to attend and participate in the course, either in-person or remotely, during the days and times that are specified on the course schedule. Students attending remotely are also strongly encouraged to have their cameras on to get the most out of the remote learning experience. Students attending the class in-person are expected to bring a laptop to each class meeting.
No meeting on May 23, 2026. To see all meeting dates, click "Full Schedule" below.
You will be granted access in Canvas to your course site and course materials approximately 24 hours prior to the published start date of the course.
Spring
AISV.819
$650
Feb. 2 - Mar. 30, Monday, 6:30pm - 9:30pm
- Flexible Attend in person or via Zoom at scheduled times.
AISV.819.(1)
Schedule
| Date | Start Time | End Time | Meeting Type | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon, 02-02-2026 | 6:30pm | 9:30pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Mon, 02-09-2026 | 6:30pm | 9:30pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Mon, 02-23-2026 | 6:30pm | 9:30pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Mon, 03-02-2026 | 6:30pm | 9:30pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Mon, 03-09-2026 | 6:30pm | 9:30pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Mon, 03-16-2026 | 6:30pm | 9:30pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Mon, 03-23-2026 | 6:30pm | 9:30pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
| Mon, 03-30-2026 | 6:30pm | 9:30pm | Flexible | SANTA CLARA / REMOTE |
This class meets simultaneously in a classroom and remotely via Zoom. Students are expected to attend and participate in the course, either in-person or remotely, during the days and times that are specified on the course schedule. Students attending remotely are also strongly encouraged to have their cameras on to get the most out of the remote learning experience. Students attending the class in-person are expected to bring a laptop to each class meeting.
No meeting on February 16, 2026. To see all meeting dates, click “Full Schedule” below.
You will be granted access in Canvas to your course site and course materials approximately 24 hours prior to the published start date of the course.
Winter
2. Completion Review:
O-CE0534
$50
Schedule
Please enroll in the AI Engineer Completion Fee only when all of the specialization requirements have been met and your final grades are posted.
Recommended Course Sequence
Students enrolling in this specialization already have some level of technical expertise. This specialization is designed to provide professionals with very specific skills that they can bring back to their company and implement.
Prior to taking enrolling in this specialization, students may wish to complete a basic course such as Generative AI Fundamentals. After taking the first course in the specialization, LLM Fundamentals and Practical Applications | AISV.819, students can take the other courses in this program, Developing RAG Based Applications | AISV.820 and Developing AI Agent Applications | AISV.821 to get the full spectrum of AI competencies needed in today’s IT workforce.
Students may return in the future to take other courses or timely workshops related to these topics.
Instructors
Program Chair & Instructor
Hien Luu
Program Chair | Head of Machine Learning Infrastructure, Zoox
HIEN LUU, M.S, head of machine learning infrastructure at Zoox and chair of the AI Business Practices, has over 20 years of experience designing and developing scalable web applications and big data infrastructure and applications at Silicon Valley companies, such as DoorDash, LinkedIn, Uber, Netflix, and Yahoo. He specializes in big data technologies and machine learning and is an artificial intelligence enthusiast. He has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington and a master’s degree in Software Engineering from San Jose State University. He has taught for UCSC Extension since 2003, serves as chair of both the AI Business Practices and the AI Engineer programs, and as an advisor on the Data Science and Data Analysis Advisory Board.
