AI Engineer Open Class: From LLM Applications to AI Agents | Melbourne

What does it take to build an AI agent?
Connecting an LLM, writing prompts and building a chat interface are only the beginning. When your application needs to work with knowledge bases, external tools and business processes, a new set of engineering challenges emerges.
Join JR Academy in Melbourne for a free, in-person open class exploring how AI agents work and what it takes to build a reliable, production-grade agentic system.
We’ll also introduce our updated AI Engineer Cohort 07 programme, including its curriculum, project structure and learning requirements.
🎤 Meet your speaker — Roy
Roy is an experienced AI Engineer who has worked on agentic AI and software development projects at Deloitte and V2.ai. His work includes AI systems for supply chain risk management, invoice automation and faster software development.
In this session, Roy will explain the inner workings of AI agents and how to build reliable, production-grade agentic systems.
🚀 What we’ll cover
1. From LLM applications to agent systems
Understand the relationship between model calls, AI workflows and agents, and explore how to choose the right approach for different tasks.
2. RAG and citations: answers grounded in evidence
Explore retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), source citations and no-answer mechanisms, including how systems should respond when the available information is insufficient.
3. MCP tools and tool calling
Learn how agents connect to external tools, and why tool definitions, parameter validation, permissions and result handling matter.
4. Execution boundaries and human approval
Discuss stopping conditions, confirmation for important actions and failure handling to make agent behaviour more controlled and predictable.
5. Evaluation and execution tracing
Discover how to assess output quality, track execution, diagnose errors and improve your system through ongoing evaluation.
🛠️ Introducing AI Engineer Cohort 07
Our updated programme follows one Agent project over 13 weeks, progressively developing it through five stages:

• System Foundation: Define requirements, architecture, data and business workflows.
• First AI Workflow: Connect AI to a practical process and produce structured outputs that can be checked and reviewed.
• Grounded Intelligence: Add RAG, citations, no-answer behaviour and quality evaluation.
• Agent System: Integrate MCP tools, execution boundaries, human approval and secure memory.
• Production Standard: Introduce execution controls, model routing, evaluations, red teaming and rollback mechanisms.

The final project brings together code, architecture, evaluations, execution logs and release evidence.
The programme includes 12 Theory Live sessions and 13 Practice Live sessions, combining explanations of core concepts with live coding to develop the same project from Week 1 to Week 13.
At the open class, we’ll walk through the learning schedule, project expectations and prerequisites to help you assess whether the programme fits your goals.
👥 Who should attend?

• Software, backend and full-stack developers looking to expand into AI engineering.
• Data and ML engineers interested in building complete AI applications.
• DevOps and cloud engineers curious about agent operations and deployment.
• IT students with programming experience exploring AI project development.
• Developers who have built a RAG or agent demo and want to strengthen their testing, evaluation and engineering skills.
• Professionals preparing for AI engineering roles or interviews.

💬 Bring your questions and meet the community
There will be time for Q&A and networking. Bring your project ideas, technical questions or learning plans:

• Where should I start with my current technical background?
• I’ve built a small AI project—what should I learn next?
• How can I turn individual skills into a complete, working system?
• How can I explain my AI project’s design, trade-offs and results in an interview?
• Is AI Engineer Cohort 07 a good fit for my goals?

Connect with fellow developers and AI learners, exchange experiences and explore your next step in AI engineering.
📍 When and where
Thursday, 24 September 2026
5:30 PM–7:00 PM · Melbourne time
ANNG Gallery
Level 17, 60 Albert Road, South Melbourne VIC 3205
🎟️ Free admission — reserve your spot and join us in Melbourne!

​🤝 Host and Venue
Host: JR Academy
Venue: ANNG Gallery
Venue Support: CloudTech Group