How long is the RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp?

12 weeks at about 15 hours a week. The weeks run as six two-week blocks; each block ends in a project you deploy and a gate you must pass before the next block opens.

Is the RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp live or self-paced?

Live. It is taught on Zoom by one instructor, with a 30-minute one-to-one every week. Nova, Square 1's AI tutor, grades every exercise and project between sessions against a rubric you can read.

When are the live sessions for the RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp?

Live sessions run on weekday evenings from 5:30 PM Sri Lanka and India time, with full-day sessions at weekends. That is 5:00 PM in Pakistan, 5:45 PM in Nepal and 6:00 PM in Bangladesh, so the sessions fit around a working day.

How much does the RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp cost?

A$200 for the founding cohort, paid once; the standard price is A$400. It is the same price in every country. Founding students keep their founding price on any second programme.

What will I build in the RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp?

6 deployed projects: Hybrid search, Ingestion, Cited answers, Evaluation, Scale and Employer brief. Each is graded against a published rubric and kept on a record an employer can open at /verify.

What skills does the RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp teach?

Python, search, embeddings, vector databases, reranking, RAG and evals. It prepares you for roles such as Search engineer, RAG engineer, AI engineer and ML engineer (retrieval).

Does the RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp guarantee a job?

No. No placement rate is published because the first cohorts have not graduated. What you leave with is six deployed projects, a recorded defence of your code and a hiring plan worked through with your instructor, including a two-week hiring sprint at the end.

Live bootcampTaught live on Zoom, one instructor

RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp

Retrieval that actually finds the right thing, measured, at scale.

RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp is a 12-week live online bootcamp, taught on Zoom by one instructor at about 15 hours a week, with 6 deployed projects and a one-to-one every week. The founding price is A$200, down from A$400. Live sessions run on weekday evenings from 5:30 PM Sri Lanka and India time, with full-day sessions at weekends.

Taught with

PythonPostgreSQLClaudeHugging FaceSupabase

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By week 12, you will have shipped

Week 1Keyword IndexA BM25 index over a small corpus with a search script that returns ranked passages
Weeks 1–2Search fundamentalsA hybrid search service over a real corpus, deployed
Week 3Chunking ComparisonA notebook that splits one document set three ways and compares retrieval hits
Weeks 3–4Chunking and ingestionAn ingestion pipeline that keeps an index fresh, deployed on a schedule
Weeks 5–6Reranking and generationA RAG application with citations that can be checked, deployed
Week 7Retrieval Test SetA set of queries with known relevant passages and a script that reports recall
Weeks 7–8EvaluationAn eval suite and a failure report for the application so far
Week 9Tenant FilterA Supabase row-level filter that keeps each tenant's documents out of other tenants' results
Weeks 9–10ScaleThe capstone: a multi-tenant retrieval system with SLOs, monitored
Weeks 11–12Employer brief and hiring sprintThe employer brief shipped, and demo day

weeks, live on Zoom: 12
hours a week: 15
projects to build: 10
minutes 1-1, every week: 30

Who it is for, and what you receive.

Engineers building search or question-answering over documents, and anyone whose RAG demo fell apart in production.

Before you start

Python and SQL; some exposure to an LLM API.

Skills

Pythonsearchembeddingsvector databasesrerankingRAGevals

A week, about 15 hours

Live on Zoom: 4h
Set reading and exercises: 6h
The project: 5h

1
Six deployed projects
Each graded by Nova against a published rubric and signed off by the instructor at the gate.
2
The twelve-week plan
Every week has its theme, its topics and what you build, published before you apply and taught live by your instructor.
3
Live on Zoom every week
A 90-minute live code review, a 60-minute squad lab, 60 minutes of office hours, and a 30-minute 1-1 with your instructor.
4
Your hiring plan
Opened in week 1 and reviewed in every 1-1: target roles, the gap map, the proof list, weekly actions, an interview log, the outcome.
5
The record
Every grade and every project with its repository at square1ai.com/u/{handle}, and the recording of your viva, verifiable by any employer.
6
The certificate
A credential ID that resolves at square1ai.com/verify to the real completion.
7
The hiring sprint
Weeks 11 and 12: CV and portfolio from graded work, applications, mock interviews scored against the role, demo day.
8
Nova for twelve weeks
A tutor with every submission of yours in its memory, at 2am as well as in class.

Twelve weeks in six parts.

Each part teaches for a week, then you build and deploy a project, then a gate checks it before the next part opens. The project and its gate are the part's entry on your record.

Live time each week on Zoom: a 90-minute class where the instructor reviews real submissions, a 60-minute squad lab, 60 minutes of office hours, and your own 30-minute 1-1. Nothing is lectured live; the recorded lessons do that.

Key skillsLexical search and rankingEmbeddings and vector indexesHybrid retrieval
Week 1
Search fundamentals
- BM25 and lexical ranking
- Embeddings and vector indexes
- Hybrid retrieval
- Query understanding
You build: A hybrid search service
Week 2
Project 1: hybrid search
- Labelled query sets
- Recall at k
You build: Hybrid search over a real corpus with recall measured
Project 1 · the gate at week 2
Hybrid search
A hybrid search service over a real corpus, deployed
You hand in
- Search service
- Labelled query set
- Recall report
The gate
Recall at ten measured against the labelled set.

What you can do by week 12.

Six retrieval systems and a retrieval eval method you can apply anywhere, from a hybrid index to a multi-tenant platform with SLOs.

1
Build lexical, vector and hybrid retrieval and measure recall against a labelled query set.
2
Parse and chunk PDFs, tables and code, and keep an index fresh with incremental ingestion.
3
Rerank and generate grounded answers with citations, and measure faithfulness.
4
Evaluate retrieval end to end and classify its failures.
5
Run retrieval at millions of documents with latency, cost and multi-tenant isolation.
6
Defend a retrieval architecture and its cost.

Roles this prepares you for

Search engineerRAG engineerAI engineerML engineer (retrieval)

No placement rate is shown, because there are no graduates to count yet. The roles above are what the projects are built for.

Your record at week 12.

Every exercise and project is graded by Nova against a rubric you can read, and every grade is kept on one page an employer can open and run. This is what the programme writes to it.

Graded, line by line: Nova reads every submission against the brief and the rubric and returns a score, what you did well and what to fix.
Six gates: A block does not open until the previous project passes its gate. You always know where you are and what is next.
A weekly 1-1: Thirty minutes with your instructor, who has already read your code before the call.
One page an employer can run: Every grade, project and the viva recording at /verify. An employer opens it, runs the code and watches you defend it.

Record, RAG and Search Engineering BootcampExample

Week 2
Hybrid search
Recall at ten measured against a labelled query set
Graded, gate signed
Week 4
Ingestion
Updated documents are searchable within the pipeline's interval
Graded, gate signed
Week 6
Cited answers
Faithfulness and citation accuracy measured
Graded, gate signed
Week 8
Evaluation
The top three failure classes are named with counts
Graded, gate signed

The entries, not the grades: those are yours to earn. The page lives at /verify and an employer needs no account to open it.

8 entries, twelve weeks. Reserving a spot holds the founding price.

Reserve a seat

How we help you find a job.

The last block is not curriculum. It is the hiring sprint, and the proof you built in the ten weeks before it.

The course booklet

The whole plan on a few pages: the parts, the projects, the gates and the price. We email it to you.

Get the booklet

1
Your hiring plan, from week 1
Six parts you and your instructor keep: target roles, the gap map from real postings, the proof to send, weekly actions, an interview log, the outcome. Read before every 1-1.
2
The hiring sprint
Weeks 11 and 12: CV, portfolio, applications, mock interviews, and demo day in front of hiring partners.
3
A record an employer can run
Your deployed projects and the recorded viva on /verify. An employer opens it, runs the code and watches you defend it.
4
The career agent
Paste a real job posting at /career and it maps the role to your graded work and what to do next.
5
The roles directory
Every role we prepare people for, what it pays and what it asks, at /roles.

Questions people ask.

About RAG and Search Engineering Bootcamp, answered from the plan on this page.

One cohort, one instructor. Hold your spot.

A cohort of 25, one instructor, 12 weeks, six things you ship. Spot holders hear the start date first, and nothing is charged before you confirm.

Six deployed retrieval systems
A retrieval eval method you can apply anywhere
A recorded viva
Your record on /verify

A$200~~A$400~~