FINANCIAL SERVICES
Banks, asset managers, insurers
SR 11-7 · DORA · MAS · FCA. Deployed under model risk and third-party oversight.
Sciens Academy
The forward-deployed
AI engineer, trained.
A structured fellowship: two weeks of guided pre-work, one week of on-site residency, and six weeks of supervised practicum. Graduates earn the CSAI-FDE Associate credential, qualified to join a deployment pod or client platform team as a junior forward-deployment engineer under senior supervision.
The Academy Charter
- We train engineers who can implement, deploy, and operate public, hybrid, and private AI where client data already lives.
- Taught on real hardware, under real constraints, inside real regulated environments.
- Certificates are earned through demonstrated deployment, never through attendance.
- The runbook belongs to the client team. Capability transfer is the objective.
Where the work happens
On your hardware.
Inside your controls.
Who we train
Built for the institutions that cannot afford to get AI wrong.
HEALTHCARE & LIFE SCIENCES
Providers, payers, research
HIPAA · HITRUST · GxP. Deployed against PHI residency and audit obligations.
PUBLIC SECTOR & DEFENSE
Sovereign and mission systems
FedRAMP-aligned · Air-gapped · CJIS-class. Deployed without egress.
Programs
Three tracks. One outcome: production.
01 · DEPLOY
FDE Fellowship
For platform, data, and security engineers who will operate sovereign AI in production under senior supervision.
- 9 weeks · 320 contact hours
- Cohorts of 8 · 1:8 instructor cap
- CSAI-FDE Associate on completion
02 · OPERATE
Practitioner Track
For analysts, clinicians, and operations leaders using Sanctum daily.
- 3 days · 6 sessions · applied labs
- Analysts · clinicians · knowledge workers
- Three production workflows, signed off
03 · GOVERN
Executive Briefing
For boards, executive committees, general counsel, and chief risk officers.
- 1 day · in-person or private virtual
- Board · C-suite · GC · CRO
- Documented AI governance stance
Curriculum
Five modules. Taught on live systems, not slides.
Module 01
Platform deployment
Sizing, topology, install, TLS, and identity wiring.
Module 02
Model lifecycle
Selection, evaluation, safe-swap, and signed provenance.
Module 03
Retrieval & connectors
Ingestion, embeddings, hybrid search, ACL propagation.
Module 04
Security & SRE
Policy engine, observability, patching, DR drills.
Module 05
Workflow & handoff
Production capstone deployed with faculty sign-off.
Download the curriculum (PDF) →Full syllabus available under NDA.
Learning outcomes
What a graduate can do, unsupervised, on day one.
CSAI-FDE · DEPLOY
Forward Deployment Engineer
- Deploy a 70B-class model on air-gapped hardware and pass a Level-2 security review without escalation.
- Instrument model, retrieval, and identity paths with production observability and DR runbooks.
- Execute a signed model safe-swap with documented provenance and rollback.
- Own an incident from detection to written post-mortem inside the client's change process.
CSAI-P · OPERATE
Practitioner
- Design and ship three production workflows against real business SLAs.
- Evaluate model output against a written acceptance rubric and reject unsafe responses.
- Escalate correctly under the client's model-risk and privacy policies.
CSAI-E · GOVERN
Executive
- Chair an AI governance committee against NIST AI RMF and ISO 42001.
- Approve or reject a production AI change with documented criteria.
- Defend the deployment to regulators, auditors, and the board.
Fellowship structure
Nine weeks. Three phases. One production deployment.
PHASE 01 · WEEKS 1–2
Guided pre-work
Environment provisioning, model theory, security baselines, and a graded readiness assessment before residency.
- ~40 hours · self-paced with weekly office hours
- Readiness exam · pass mark required to attend
PHASE 02 · WEEK 3
On-site residency
Classroom, instructor-led, on real hardware. Five modules, daily labs, end-of-week deployment exercise.
- 5 days · 8 fellows · 1 lead instructor + 1 TA
- Delivered on client hardware or Sciens lab
PHASE 03 · WEEKS 4–9
Supervised practicum
Fellows deploy Sanctum inside their own environment with weekly faculty reviews and a signed production capstone.
- 6 weeks · weekly 1-hour faculty review
- Capstone signed off by faculty and client sponsor
Prerequisites & assessment
Admissions are engineered, not marketed.
Prerequisite 01
Engineering baseline
Three or more years in platform, data, MLOps, or security engineering. Comfortable on Linux, containers, and Python.
Prerequisite 02
Executive sponsorship
Named sponsor at the VP+ level with a scoped production workload the fellow will deploy against.
Prerequisite 03
Readiness assessment
Graded pre-work exam on model risk, retrieval, and identity. Pass mark 80%. One retake permitted.
Assessment
Rubric, not a certificate mill
Daily lab sign-off, end-of-residency deployment exercise, and a signed production capstone. Failure to complete the capstone means no certification.
Cohort
Small, deliberate, English-language
Eight fellows per cohort. Delivered in English. On-site at a Sciens lab or, for enterprise cohorts, at the client site.
Assessment & certification
Transparent rubric. Written pass criteria. Named appeals.
Rubric
Five graded competencies
Architecture & deployment (25%), model lifecycle discipline (20%), retrieval & data governance (20%), security & operations (20%), capstone delivery (15%).
Pass mark
80% weighted, no dimension below 70%
A fellow cannot pass overall while failing any competency. One retake permitted within 60 days.
Examiners
Two independent graders
One lead instructor and one non-teaching examiner. Disagreements resolved by the Academy Dean.
Retake
One capstone retake within 90 days
Structured remediation plan, faculty office hours, and a second graded capstone attempt.
Appeals
Written, 14-day window
Appeals reviewed by the Dean and one external faculty member. Decisions documented and returned in writing.
Contact hours
320 hours · ~32 CEUs
40 instructor-led residency hours, 40 guided pre-work hours, and 240 supervised practicum hours. Eligible for approximately 60 CPE credits (ISACA / (ISC)² self-report). Formal accreditation pursuit under way for 2026.
Faculty
Taught by the engineers who ship it.
Delivery bench
Forward-deployed engineers.
What they teach is what they operate.
Platform architects & governance
Designers of the stack. Former counsel and risk officers who know the failure modes.
CREDENTIAL 01
Lead instructors
Minimum 8 years forward-deployment experience at tier-one financial, healthcare, or defense integrators. Active production engagements every quarter.
CREDENTIAL 02
Governance faculty
Former general counsel, chief risk officers, and model-risk leads from regulated institutions. Members of NIST AI RMF and ISO 42001 working groups.
CREDENTIAL 03
Clearances & ratios
Clearance-eligible faculty available for public-sector cohorts. Held to a 1:8 instructor-to-fellow cap with a named teaching assistant per cohort.
Practicum governance
Six weeks inside your environment, on written terms.
GOVERNANCE 01
Intellectual property
All artefacts, runbooks, and configurations produced during practicum are owned by the client. Sciens retains no rights to client data or deployment code.
GOVERNANCE 02
Escalation & SLA
Faculty on-call during practicum with a 4-business-hour response SLA. Any production-impacting incident routes to the client's change-management process, not the fellow.
GOVERNANCE 03
Access & controls
Fellows operate under the client's identity, least-privilege, and audit controls. No Sciens standing access to client systems. Background checks and NDAs mandatory.
Certification
A credential earned in production, not in a classroom.
Sciens issues a tiered credential. The Fellowship confers the Associate tier, qualifying a graduate to operate under senior supervision. The Professional tier is awarded only after two live, signed-off client deployments in the field.
CSAI-FDE·A
Associate · Forward Deployment Engineer
Awarded on Fellowship completion. Qualified to operate under senior FDE supervision on a Sciens pod or client platform team.
CSAI-FDE·P
Professional · Forward Deployment Engineer
Awarded after two live, signed-off client deployments. Qualified to lead a workstream inside a regulated production environment.
CSAI-FDE·S
Senior · Forward Deployment Engineer
Conferred by the Academy Dean on portfolio review. Qualified to own end-to-end deployment across multiple regulated clients.
Calendar & investment
Four cohorts a year. Priced against outcomes.
Q4 2026
November cohort
Residency: Nov 9–13. Practicum through Dec 24. Applications close Oct 2.
Q1 2027
February cohort
Residency: Feb 15–19. Practicum through Apr 2. Applications close Jan 8.
Q2 2027
May cohort
Residency: May 10–14. Practicum through Jun 25. Applications close Apr 2.
Q3 2027
September cohort
Residency: Sep 13–17. Practicum through Oct 29. Applications close Aug 6.
Per seat
Fellowship investment
Per-fellow tuition disclosed on application. Includes pre-work, residency, practicum supervision, capstone review, and one retake.
Enterprise cohort
Private cohort of 8
Delivered on client site or in a Sciens lab. Pricing disclosed on scoping call. Includes governance briefing for the sponsoring executive team.
Reserve seats or scope a private cohort →Cancellation and transfer terms provided at enrolment.
Alumni outcomes
Graduates operating sovereign AI in production.
DEPLOYED
100% within 30 days
Every certified fellow to date has placed a production deployment into their sponsoring institution within 30 days of certification.
COHORTS
27 fellows · 6 institutions
Across banks, an asset manager, a national health system, and two public-sector agencies. Names withheld under client NDA.
RECERTIFICATION
94% annual recertification
Fellows remaining as named operators one year on. The residual 6% moved off the deployment for role changes, not for performance.
Post-academy support
Certification is the start of the relationship, not the end.
SUPPORT 01
Faculty office hours
Weekly for the first quarter after certification. Monthly thereafter, for the life of the deployment.
SUPPORT 02
Retake & remediation
One capstone retake included. Structured remediation plan for fellows who do not pass on first attempt.
SUPPORT 03
Recertification
Annual recertification against the current standards baseline. Required to remain a named operator on the deployment.
Standards we train against
Every module is mapped to the frameworks our clients are audited against.
NISTAI RMF 1.0ISO/IEC42001SR11-7EUAI ActSOC 2Type IIISO27001HITRUSTCSF
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