Level · FND
Core principles, tooling ecosystems, foundational architectural patterns, and verified basic implementations.
One level of Certified Forward-Deployed Engineer. Each level is bought, sat and credentialed on its own.
One-time payment
$99
Foundation (Beginner) level only
One payment for this level. Nothing recurring, no subscription.
Includes 2 retakes, each after a thirty-day wait.
The candidate can read a field situation and place it correctly inside the profession's named frameworks: which operating model a request calls for, which of the five tests fails, whether a statement is a fact or a commitment, what a 2xx proves, what a demo does not prove, which evidence source can settle a claim, and what a status report is hiding. They know the standard failure modes by name and can say what evidence a claim requires.
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.
Below Professional (Pro)
A Foundation item names the framework and supplies complete evidence; the candidate classifies. "Here are the five tests and this vignette — which test fails?" The moment an item withholds the framework, or requires the candidate to say what is missing from an artifact, it is Practitioner or above.
Out of scope at this level
Selecting a topology; choosing an access model; authoring a canary hypothesis, reconciliation contract or approval state machine; incident command; productization economics; any item that requires a customer's real constraint set or authority to be resolved.
Students and career switchers; solutions engineers, support engineers and product engineers joining a deployment team; backend engineers moving into customer-facing delivery.
A level is defined by what you can demonstrably do, never by how long you have been doing it. Enter at whichever rung fits.
Working software literacy — HTTP/APIs, a database, version control, reading logs. No FDE experience assumed.
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.
