Level · PRO
Production reliability, offline & online evaluation suites, latency/cost budgets, guardrails, and incident mitigation.
One level of Certified Forward-Deployed Engineer. Each level is bought, sat and credentialed on its own.
One-time payment
$199
Professional (Pro) level only
One payment for this level. Nothing recurring, no subscription.
Includes 2 retakes, each after a thirty-day wait.
The candidate owns a production outcome across boundaries. They can trace a tenant claim through cache, index, event and backup and find where it is dropped; attribute a quality regression to the harness rather than the model; choose fail-open versus fail-closed per feature; judge whether an offered artifact supports the readiness claim; and issue a Proceed / Harden / Pause / Stop with the evidence that would reverse it. They can review another engineer's design and say which link in the chain is unproven.
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 Foundation (Beginner)
A Practitioner item contains exactly one defective thing inside one boundary, and one correct remedy. "This handler opens a transaction, calls the partner API, then commits — what must change?" The moment an item presents two defensible options and requires a decision with a named owner and a reversal trigger, it is Professional.
Below Expert
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
Designing the forward-deployed function itself; cross-portfolio productization economics; standards governance across teams; multi-supplier programme ownership; commercial negotiation.
Senior field engineers, technical leads on named accounts, engineers who sign readiness or hold the pager for a deployed workflow.
A level is defined by what you can demonstrably do, never by how long you have been doing it. Enter at whichever rung fits.
Practitioner certification (or challenge exam) plus a passed practical. Professional may not be awarded on objective items alone.
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.
