❋

Next cohort: June 3,2026

Apprenticeship Program

Apply Today

Story about how the education system is broken/broken by AI 

What to Expect

Apprentices work in supervised teams on production-grade agentic AI systems — pipelines of AI agents that ingest data, reason about it, and produce decisions or outputs. Each cohort has a real client with a real problem. The system they build goes into production.

Training runs 20 weeks. The first 12 weeks are technical — architecture, engineering, deployment. The final 8 weeks are paid on-the-job training at the client site or at CFA.

Gary Mace, CFA's Technical Lead, oversees every cohort. He builds the reference implementations. Apprentices extend them. Everything merges to a shared codebase. By graduation, every apprentice has shipped production software.

❋ Agentic Architecture

Apprentices learn to build multi-agent systems — not chatbots. Ingestion, normalization, extraction, enrichment, analytics, query. Each agent has a defined role. The pipeline produces durable, auditable intelligence.

❋ LLM Engineering

Prompt engineering, token cost discipline, model selection across Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus tiers. Apprentices learn to make architecture decisions that balance performance and cost — the discipline that separates production AI from demo AI.

❋ Production Standards

Every cohort uses professional engineering practices — GitHub, pull requests, code review, sprint planning, runbooks. By graduation, apprentices have a professional development history that demonstrates real capability.

❋ Portfolio of Experience

Waifinder apprentices do not graduate with a certificate, they graduate with a portfolio of production software — and a team that already knows how to work together.

6 Agent pipeline

90 Days to production

100% Production deployed

Sprint 1

Weeks 1 - 12

Describe a typical sequence over the 12 weeks

Check-In

9:00 – 9:30am

Group Activity

11:00am

Lunch Break

12:30pm

Creative Workshop

2:00pm

Dinner

6:30pm

Sprint 1

Weeks 1 - 12

Describe a typical sequence over the 12 weeks

Check-In

9:00 – 9:30am

Group Activity

11:00am

Lunch Break

12:30pm

Creative Workshop

2:00pm

Dinner

6:30pm

Describe a typical sequence over the last 8 weeks

Check-In

9:00 – 9:30am

Group Activity

11:00am

Lunch Break

12:30pm

Creative Workshop

2:00pm

Sprint 1

Weeks 13-20

  • "What I love most is the flexibility. I can go at my own pace, revisit lessons, and keep learning whenever it works for me."

    Former Customer

  • "Even as a total beginner, I never felt lost. The step-by-step structure and encouragement along the way made all the difference."

    Former Customer

  • "This has been such a worthwhile investment in myself."

    Former Customer

How It Works

  • Browse our upcoming events to find the one that feels right for you. We host events year-round in all different locations and climates.

  • Sign up and pay all required fees to reserve your spot. If plans change, you can cancel up to 14 days before the retreat start to receive a 50% refund.

  • After booking, we'll send you a Welcome Packet with everything you need to know—detailed schedules, packing list recommendations, add-ons to consider, and more.

  • We'd recommend booking your transportation to and from the event as soon as possible, to ensure you can arrive without any complications or delays.

  • Now all that's left to do is pack your bags and get excited for your new adventure.

Book Your Stay

Register