Building Reliable LLM Systems is a comprehensive course for AI practitioners looking to move beyond basic models and create production-grade applications. While getting an LLM to generate text is easy, ensuring a consistently accurate, relevant, and trustworthy output is a significant engineering challenge. This course provides a systematic framework for tackling the entire lifecycle of LLM reliability.

Building Reliable LLM Systems
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Building Reliable LLM Systems
This course is part of LLM Engineering That Works: Prompting, Tuning, and Retrieval Specialization

Instructor: Professionals from the Industry
Included with
Recommended experience
What you'll learn
Build scripts with lexical/semantic metrics to evaluate LLMs, diagnose hallucinations, and balance vector-search recall against latency.
Apply hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and significance metrics to evaluate model accuracy and validate results from A/B experiments.
Utilize parameterized SQL and data manipulation to segment user logs, calculate retention, and securely retrieve large-scale datasets.
Analyze LLM performance gaps to prioritize technical fixes and implement remediation measures for production-level reliability.
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March 2026
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There are 5 modules in this course
This module lays the groundwork for quantitative Large Language Mode (LLM) evaluation. Learners will discover why relying on intuition to judge model performance is unsustainable and explore the foundational metrics used to create automated, objective evaluation systems. We will cover both lexical similarity metrics (like BLEU and ROUGE-L) that assess text structure and semantic metrics (like cosine similarity) that capture meaning. By the end of this module, learners will have the conceptual understanding and practical code to build their first automated evaluation script.
What's included
8 videos3 readings3 assignments3 ungraded labs
When a production chatbot starts giving incorrect answers, how do you find the problem and fix it? This module equips AI practitioners, ML engineers, and data analysts with the essential skills for debugging production LLMs. Go beyond theory and learn the systematic, data-driven workflow that professionals use to solve the critical problem of AI hallucinations. You will be equipped to transition from merely observing AI failures to expertly diagnosing and resolving them.
What's included
5 videos3 readings3 assignments2 ungraded labs
When making high-stakes deployment decisions, a simple accuracy score is not enough. This module equips you with the statistical methods to rigorously validate LLM performance improvements. By the end of this module, you will be able to move beyond subjective "it seems better" evaluations to confidently state, "we can prove it's better," ensuring every deployment decision is backed by sound statistical evidence.
What's included
5 videos2 readings3 assignments3 ungraded labs
In the world of large-scale AI, slow queries and inefficient search can bring a system to its knees. This module provides the critical skills to prevent that, focusing on practical database and vector search optimization techniques. By the end of this module, you will be equipped to systematically analyze and optimize production retrieval systems, ensuring your AI applications are not only powerful but also fast and reliable.
What's included
4 videos3 readings4 assignments3 ungraded labs
In this module, you will conduct an end-to-end performance audit comparing two LLM variants using an A/B test dataset. You will implement a pipeline to calculate key performance metrics, including lexical and semantic similarity, and use statistical A/B testing to validate model improvements. The project culminates in a comprehensive report where you will correlate hallucination rates with retrieval logs and synthesize your findings into data-driven recommendations for stakeholders, guiding the decision for a production-level rollout in a customer support application.
What's included
2 readings1 assignment
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Frequently asked questions
The course assumes basic familiarity with statistics. It includes practical, applied lessons on confidence intervals and hypothesis testing, and offers step-by-step examples so that practitioners with modest statistical knowledge can follow along. Consider a short statistics refresher if you are new to hypothesis testing.
You will write evaluation scripts in Python, analyze logs and segmented datasets, run A/B test analyses, use SQL for data retrieval, and evaluate vector-search parameters (e.g., HNSW) commonly used with vector databases. No proprietary tools are required.
The course focuses on measurable, repeatable engineering practices: automated evaluation pipelines, statistical experiment design, log-driven debugging, and data-layer tuning. These skills help you prioritize fixes and validate improvements in real production settings.
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Financial aid available,
¹ Some assignments in this course are AI-graded. For these assignments, your data will be used in accordance with Coursera's Privacy Notice.





