Forward Deployed Engineer: Systems Foundations
The FDE Systems Foundations certification is a 50-question, 45-minute exam that proves you can run coding agents at scale: multi-repo orchestration, cost-aware routing, CI/CD with agents in the loop, and observability that catches the failure modes models actually have.
How the credential happens
- 01
Pay $25.00
Pay once via Paddle. No subscription.
- 02
50 questions · 90 min
Server-timed. Randomized question + option order per attempt.
- 03
Pass at 40 / 50
Server scores instantly. No partial-credit games.
- 04
Retry for full price
Available 2 hours after submit. Fresh question subset on each retry.
- 05
Public certificate
Verify URL with issuance date, recipient, live status.
See a sample verify page →
Who this cert is for
If you are growing into a senior role
You have shipped enough with coding agents to know they break in patterns. This cert is the structured version of the lessons most engineers learn by watching a CI bill triple in a month. Show up to your next senior interview having already named the design tradeoffs the team is making by trial and error today.
If you are the senior engineer your team pings
You are the person who decides whether the team uses Claude Code, Cursor, or rolls a custom agent harness this quarter. The cert is your verifiable answer to the question 'are we set up to ship safely with this?' Specialization is rare; this is how you make sure people know yours.
What you’ll prove
- Design a system-level prompt and orchestration layer that makes agents reliably useful across a multi-repo codebase.
- Decide when to run an agent against a single repo, a monorepo, or a service mesh, and why the answer changes the prompt.
- Route work between fast and reasoning-capable models in a way that holds cost flat as feature breadth grows.
- Build a CI/CD pipeline that uses coding agents as a stage without making the failure modes invisible to the human reviewer.
- Instrument agent runs with telemetry that surfaces the failures models actually have: silent regressions, scoped tool calls, run-away token spend.
What the exam covers
- System-level prompting and orchestration (10 questions)
- Multi-repo and monorepo organization for agents (10 questions)
- Cost-aware model routing decisions (10 questions)
- CI/CD with agents in the pipeline (10 questions)
- Observability and debugging at scale (10 questions)
Sample questions
Real questions from the bank, in the same shape you’ll see in the exam. Correct answers are not shown.
- Q01Cost-aware routing
Your team runs 4,000 coding-agent calls per day. 90% are short refactors and small feature adds; 10% are deep architectural changes. The reasoning model costs 8x the fast model per token. Which routing policy is most defensible?
- Run everything on the fast model; let the team escalate to reasoning when they hit issues.
- Run everything on the reasoning model; accept the 8x cost as the price of quality.
- Route by request shape (file count, instruction length, presence of 'refactor' or 'design' keywords) and let the team override.
- A/B test 50/50 and pick whichever model has fewer rollbacks next month.
- Q02CI/CD with agents
You add a coding-agent stage to CI that auto-fixes lint and type errors before running tests. After a month, 3% of merged PRs have subtle bugs that passed tests but break in production. What is the highest-leverage change?
- Remove the agent stage. The 3% regression rate is too high.
- Keep the stage but require a human review of the diff the agent produced, surfaced as a separate review request.
- Have the agent also write tests for its changes and merge if those tests pass.
- Move the agent stage to nightly and only run it on stale PRs.
- Q03Observability
Your team's agent runs spike from 200 to 2,000 calls in one day. Costs triple. You suspect a runaway loop. Which telemetry signal will localize the cause fastest?
- Total token spend grouped by user.
- Per-run token count distribution, sorted by tail percentile.
- Average latency per call.
- Number of completed PRs per day.
Honest tradeoffs
- · Not a beginner cert. The Foundations cert covers the single-feature, single-agent flow first.
- · Not a vendor cert. There is no 'AWS Bedrock' or 'Anthropic Console' section.
- · Not a guarantee of a principal-engineer title. Treat it as a strong signal alongside your shipped work.
- · Not a substitute for production operational experience. The exam is about discipline; production teaches you the rest.
It is proof you can architect coding-agent work at the level the engineering org needs from its senior people, and you know which design choices stop the failure modes the rest of the team has been finding the hard way.
Frequently asked
- Should I take this before Foundations?
- No. Foundations covers the single-feature single-agent flow that this cert assumes you already do well. Systems Foundations is about the layer above: orchestration, routing, observability. If you have not shipped a feature with a coding agent yet, start with Foundations.
- Is this useful if my team is not yet running agents in CI?
- Yes. The exam tests the design tradeoffs that decide whether agent-in-CI is going to help or hurt. Sitting it before you wire anything up is exactly the right time to discover which choices are load-bearing.
- Will employers actually recognize this credential?
- Each certificate has a public verify URL at academy.juscode.co/c/<id>. Recruiters open it once and see the issue date, your name, and live status. Paste it into LinkedIn, an email signature, or a resume PDF.
- How vendor-neutral is the exam?
- Fully. Questions describe scenarios in terms of fast-vs-reasoning models, file counts, tool budgets, and pipeline stages. They do not name a vendor or a specific product feature.
- What if I fail?
- Pay $2 to retry once after a two-hour gate. Automatic gate; brute-force-resistant. Retry draws a fresh question subset.
- How long is the cert valid?
- One year from issue. The public verify page shows expired status after that; renewal exams are available.
Before you start
- · You’ll capture the name on your certificate before the exam starts. It cannot be edited after publishing.
- · 1.5 h hard timer. The server auto-submits whatever’s answered when it expires.
- · One attempt per payment. Next attempt available 2 hours after submit.
- · Read the honor code. AI-assisted attempts may be reviewed and certificates revoked.
What this changes for you
Your team is running coding agents across multiple repos and the cost line is creeping up while the failure modes get harder to reproduce. You can ship features, but the question 'is this safe to scale to the whole org' makes you pause.
You can name the routing rule, the CI stage design, the multi-repo orchestration choice, and the telemetry you watch. You have a credential that says you are the senior person the org wants making these calls.
Exam integrity & refund policy
This is a proctored exam. By purchasing and beginning it, you agree to the honor code and to automated, in-browser integrity monitoring of your session. Conduct that breaches the integrity policy, including leaving the exam window, switching tabs or applications, using external help or AI tools, or copying, cutting, or pasting exam content, is recorded. Repeated violations result in immediate forfeiture of your exam attempt.
Exam fees are non-refundable once an attempt has begun, including attempts ended early for integrity violations. jusCode Academy may withhold, suspend, or revoke any certificate obtained through conduct that violates this policy, with or without prior notice.
One attempt per payment. Next attempt available 2 hours after submit.