Syllabus
30 lessons in 8 parts, mapped node by node to roadmap.sh/inference-engineering. Built for an app developer becoming an inference engineer in 13 weeks at about 5 hours a week.
Become hireable as an inference engineer. By the end you can do the napkin math (TTFT, ITL, KV cache, $/1M tokens), serve and load-test models with vLLM and llama.cpp, apply and measure the core optimizations, and show a public capstone repo. The full mission is in MISSION.md.
How every lesson works
- Concept, briefly. Only the knowledge the lab needs, with sources in the margin.
- Predict. You write down what you expect before running anything, because a wrong prediction teaches more than a right one.
- Lab. Hands-on on your Mac or a free cloud GPU, with step-by-step checklists and a results checker.
- Exercises. Quizzes and napkin-math problems with instant feedback, plus one "explain it" answer you write from memory.
- Recall. From Lesson 2 on, a few questions from earlier lessons, because spacing is what makes knowledge stick.
- Portfolio. Every lab adds a result to
portfolio/LOG.md, the raw material for your capstone and interviews.
Lessons are generated one at a time. Finish one, tell your teacher how it went, and the next one is written for where you actually are.
Why the order differs from the roadmap
- Outside in. You start by measuring a model the way its users experience it (HTTP, streaming, load). That's familiar territory for an app developer. Then you go inside the model.
- Prerequisites just in time. Neural networks and transformers come right before the KV cache and the roofline, which need them.
- Grouped by skill. MoE sits next to expert parallelism, continuous batching is taught with vLLM, cold starts with containers, cost estimation with capacity planning, and image/video models with generation inference.
- Depth follows the mission. core lessons are interview-critical and get full labs. light lessons give awareness with a short lab.
Lab platforms: Mac your M1 Pro · Colab T4 free NVIDIA GPU in the browser · Kaggle 2×T4 free, two GPUs · Calculator / sim runs anywhere.
Roadmap coverage
Every node on the roadmap and the lesson that teaches it: .