Level · EXP
Architectural leadership, cross-system resilience, multi-agent frameworks, enterprise governance, and catastrophe recovery.
One level of Certified Forward-Deployed Engineer. Each level is bought, sat and credentialed on its own.
One-time payment
$349
Expert level only
One payment for this level. Nothing recurring, no subscription.
Includes 2 retakes, each after a thirty-day wait.
The candidate resolves ambiguous, high-consequence situations where the evidence contradicts a prior commitment, and sets boundaries other engineers work inside: invalidating topology alternatives against a constraint set and naming the unowned seam; declaring a mixed-trust agent architecture not ready despite a working guardrail; separating the invariant from the customer's legitimate variation and stating what the reusable core must not own; distinguishing commercial evidence from product evidence; refusing or narrowing an engagement in words a customer can act on; and diagnosing a field function that is accumulating a services liability.
Every boundary on this ladder is written down and assessed, not implied by a harder paper. If the sentences below describe work you already do, the level above is probably the one to sit.
Above Professional (Pro)
A Professional item is settled by evidence available inside one engagement, and the correct answer is a decision plus an owner plus a reversal trigger. The moment the correct answer costs the organisation something outside this engagement — a standard others must follow, a refusal that risks the account, a retired abstraction, capacity taken from another customer — it is Expert.
Out of scope at this level
Vendor trivia and incident brand recall; deep platform operations (Kubernetes, cloud primitives) — the book defers these explicitly; regulatory interpretation; people management and hiring law; corporate finance. An Expert item that requires any of these is out of blueprint.
Principal/staff forward-deployed engineers, field architects, and leads of a forward-deployed practice.
A level is defined by what you can demonstrably do, never by how long you have been doing it. Enter at whichever rung fits.
Professional certification plus a submitted practical portfolio (see practical requirement below).
These weights belong to this level, not to the certification: a domain that is supporting at one rung can be critical at the next. A domain at 15% contributes 15% of the questions, rounded to whole questions.
Published here so nothing on this list is a surprise on the day. They are repeated on the screen immediately before you start.
This level draws on 6000 approved questions, of which 6000 are on pilot.
A pilot question has passed automated checks — its format, its answer key and duplicate screening. It has not yet been reviewed by a human subject-matter expert, and no examination board has signed this exam off — Abhyaas issues and verifies this credential, and nobody else has yet judged it.
We publish that number because you are deciding whether to pay for this, and it is the kind of thing you would rather know now than work out later.
