What Is the Databricks GenAI Engineer Associate?

The Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate validates the ability to build and deploy LLM-powered applications on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. It is hands-on and engineering-focused, centered on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): designing applications, preparing and chunking data, building retrieval with Vector Search, assembling and deploying chains with Mosaic AI and Model Serving, evaluating and monitoring quality, and governing everything with Unity Catalog. Ideal for data engineers and ML practitioners productionizing generative AI.

Design Applications & Prompts

1 week

Translate business needs into LLM application requirements

Choose model and approach — prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, agents

Prompt engineering — zero/few-shot, chain-of-thought

Design multi-stage reasoning and tool-use chains

Define guardrails and constrain model outputs

Select model size/cost tradeoffs for a use case

Data Preparation & Vector Search

1–2 weeks

Document ingestion and parsing for RAG

Chunking strategies — size, overlap, and metadata

Embedding models and embedding generation

Databricks Vector Search — indexes and Delta sync

Retrieval tuning — top-k, filtering, hybrid search

Delta Lake and Unity Catalog for source data

Build & Deploy with Mosaic AI

2 weeks

Assemble RAG chains with LangChain / Mosaic AI

Foundation Model APIs and external model endpoints

Log and register models with MLflow

Mosaic AI Model Serving — deploy chains as endpoints

Mosaic AI Agent Framework and Agent Evaluation

Pyfunc models and custom inference logic

Evaluate, Monitor & Govern

1 week

Evaluate quality with MLflow LLM evaluation

Metrics for RAG — relevance, groundedness, faithfulness

Mosaic AI Gateway — rate limits, logging, safety

Inference Tables for monitoring production traffic

Unity Catalog governance for data, models, and functions

Security, PII handling, and access control

📚 Recommended Study Resources

Databricks Academy

Official "Generative AI Engineering with Databricks" learning path with hands-on labs

Exam Guide

Official Databricks GenAI Engineer Associate exam guide covering all six domains

Databricks Documentation

Mosaic AI, Vector Search, Model Serving, and Agent Framework docs

Generative AI Cookbook

Databricks' RAG cookbook with reference architectures and evaluation patterns

Ready to Test Your Knowledge?

Take our Databricks GenAI Engineer practice exam covering RAG, Mosaic AI, Vector Search, evaluation, and governance

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🧱 Databricks Generative AI Engineer – Associate