The RAG and Context Engineering: Designing and Building Production-Grade AI Systems program from MIT xPRO is an eight-week learning journey that equips technical professionals to design, evaluate, and deploy retrieval-aware large language model (LLM) systems that perform reliably in real-world environments. Organizations today increasingly need experts who can architect and strengthen AI systems against inconsistent outputs, security vulnerabilities, and performance bottlenecks.

In eight weeks, this program builds expertise in evaluation discipline, system auditing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) design, and the core principles that determine whether LLM systems succeed or fail in production. Through faculty-led live online sessions, guided labs, applied exercises, and a capstone project that requires you to build and evaluate a production-grade system end to end, the curriculum takes you from understanding the mechanics of LLMs to designing retrieval-augmented systems built for accuracy and safety.