Introducing the Focused Agent Academy

The most rewarding role I’ve ever had

I’ve worked with a lot of great teams over my career, but one role has always stood out: teaching at Dev Bootcamp. Helping people move from nontechnical careers into software engineering is still the most rewarding work I’ve ever done.

A few weeks ago, I received a Slack message from Austin, our CEO, that started with, “Alright, I have a job proposition for you.”

He wanted to launch an Agent Academy at Focused: a program to hire strong senior software engineers and train them to become agent engineers. Given my background in education, he asked if I’d lead it.

My response: HELL YES!

Why an Agent Academy?

There are a lot of talented software engineers looking for their next role right now. But finding engineers with the depth of experience in agent systems needed to meet the standards we uphold for our clients takes time.

Many excellent engineers haven’t had the opportunity to build an agent yet. That doesn’t mean they’re starting from scratch. They already know how to design systems, write software, debug failures, and work through difficult problems. With the right training and hands-on experience, they can bring those skills to agent engineering.

So why train people instead of continuing the search? Because it’s a win for everyone.

Participants get paid to learn new skills and put them to work. We develop the engineers our clients need, instead of waiting for the market to catch up. And when we did the math, two months of training cost about the same as paying a recruiter.

Quite frankly, we’d rather invest that money in people. No offense, recruiters.

How the program works

The Focused Agent Academy is a paid, full-time, contract-to-hire program. The contract runs for three months, and participants who successfully complete the program will receive a full-time W-2 offer.

Instruction is delivered remotely, with participants expected to work from their local Focused office in Denver or Chicago two to three days a week.

My time at Dev Bootcamp shaped how we designed the program. The Academy is built around project-based learning: participants work through learning materials from our certification providers, then apply what they’ve learned by building.

Hands on the keyboard is how people learn. Writing the code, watching it fail, and figuring out why builds an understanding that copying and pasting can’t give you. That’s why the first two weeks are without coding agents. Before using them, participants need to understand the systems they’re building.

Weeks 1–6: Curriculum

Eval-driven agent development

Participants build agents in their editors, not notebooks, with eval-driven development at the center of the curriculum. They define the behavior they expect, build evaluation datasets, and establish a baseline they can test changes against.

As they work through retrieval, tool use, and multi-agent workflows, they use evals and execution traces to identify failures and decide what to change. Changing a prompt, model, or routing decision means measuring the effect across their test cases, including checking for regressions. Learning to make those calls is a core part of becoming an agent engineer at Focused.

What participants will build

Starting in week three, participants can use coding agents as part of their development workflow.

The initial curriculum covers:

• Week 1: LLM fundamentals with the Claude client SDK
• Week 2: LangGraph and LangChain
• Week 3: Working with coding agents and building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agents
• Week 4: Multi-agent architectures and Deep Agents
• Week 5: Deployment and monitoring
• Week 6: Security

Weeks 7–8: Capstone

Participants bring those skills together by building a production agent with evaluations, data flywheels, MCP connectors, tools, and more.

The capstone gives them more independent time to build, troubleshoot, and make decisions about their systems. During these weeks, they’ll also take the Claude Certified Architect and LangChain Certified Agent Engineer certification exams.

Weeks 9–12: Client work

Each participant joins a Focused team working on real client projects, putting what they’ve learned into practice alongside experienced engineers.

At Dev Bootcamp, I watched people from every background become software engineers. Now the industry is shifting again, and I can’t wait to help another group of engineers make the leap.

Is this for you?

If you’re a senior software engineer ready to build agent systems, we’d love to meet you. Whether you’re looking for a new challenge or finding your next role after a layoff, the Academy gives you paid time to learn, build, and put your experience to work.

Our first cohort starts November 2 in Denver and Chicago.

Apply now.