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Intensive Training

10 Academy's Intensive Training is a selective, full-time, high-impact program designed to launch early-career Ethiopian technology professionals into global AI and data careers.

TRP2, the second edition of the Tenacious Recruitment Program, is a training-to-employment pathway that prepares high-potential graduates for full-time AI Engineer and Forward Deployed Engineer roles at Tenacious Intelligence Corporation.

Tenacious Intelligence Corporation (Tenacious) is a US-registered AI engineering company with its delivery headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that does two kinds of work. In outsourcing, we place skilled AI engineers, forward-deployed engineers, and data engineers directly into client teams. In consulting, we design, build, and ship AI products for clients end to end.

TRP2 is a 3-month intensive program delivered by 10 Academy, focused on identifying high-potential talent in Ethiopia and preparing them for their first international roles in an AI-first career track through Tenacious. This includes technical skills as well as communications and career skills.

Top performers receive job offers at Tenacious.

Applications Now Open

Applications close on November 14, 2026.

Apply Now

10 Academy's Intensive Training is a selective, full-time, high-impact program designed to launch early-career Ethiopian technology professionals into global AI and data careers.

TRP2, the second edition of the Tenacious Recruitment Program, is a training-to-employment pathway that prepares high-potential graduates for full-time AI Engineer and Forward Deployed Engineer roles at Tenacious Intelligence Corporation.

Tenacious Intelligence Corporation (Tenacious) is a US-registered AI engineering company with its delivery headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that does two kinds of work. In outsourcing, we place skilled AI engineers, forward-deployed engineers, and data engineers directly into client teams. In consulting, we design, build, and ship AI products for clients end to end.

TRP2 is a 3-month intensive program delivered by 10 Academy, focused on identifying high-potential talent in Ethiopia and preparing them for their first international roles in an AI-first career track through Tenacious. This includes technical skills as well as communications and career skills.

Top performers receive job offers at Tenacious.

Key Dates

Milestone

Date

Application period

2 to 14 November 2026

Assessment and briefing

15 to 21 November 2026

Program starts

Monday, 30 November 2026

Commitment deposit due

Monday, 21 December 2026

Graduation

Friday, 26 February 2027

Employment start (top performers)

March 2027

TRP Testimonials

“Before 10 Academy, I worked in information systems and data analytics in the banking and NGO sectors, but my real passion was AI engineering. The training gave me strong technical skills, practical exposure, and a supportive community that still backs me today. With that support and my performance, I landed a job in my 10th week. At Tenacious, I now work on AI engineering projects for international clients, growing every day in a field I truly love.”
Estifanos Teklay, AI Engineer, Tenacious Intelligence Corp
“Before 10 Academy, I was an AI/ML Engineer looking to sharpen my skills through real-world experience. The training strengthened my engineering mindset, from understanding client needs and designing solutions to handling edge cases and delivering quality work. What began as a 12-week program turned into a full-time offer at Tenacious within just two weeks. Today, as a Full-Stack AI Engineer, I build innovative solutions that deliver meaningful impact.”
Tadesse Abateneh, Full-Stack AI Engineer, Tenacious Intelligence Corp
“Before 10 Academy, I was a backend developer working with .NET and C#, eager to grow into AI and modern engineering. The program was intense and rewarding, exposing me to LLMs, AI-assisted development, and practical ways to build intelligent systems. Through the Tenacious Recruitment Program, I became the first TRP graduate to join Tenacious Intelligence. Today, I’m a Backend Developer at Computrition, and I’m grateful to 10 Academy for preparing me for this journey.”
Mama Mohammed Kebede, Backend Developer, Computrition
“Before 10 Academy, I was a full-stack developer who felt I needed something more to truly level up. The agentic AI training was intensive, but it gave me the knowledge, confidence, and ‘I can do it’ mindset that transformed how I approach tech. When I joined Tenacious, nothing felt overwhelming because the program had prepared me so well. Now I’m part of a skilled, understanding team, gaining experience I couldn’t get just anywhere.”
Kemeriya Major, AI Engineer, Tenacious Intelligence Corp
“Before 10 Academy, I was already working in tech, but my skills were scattered and didn’t match what the market needed. The training gave me more than knowledge: it taught me how to learn anything from scratch and how to work through problems in today’s tech environment. That mindset helped me move from training into employment. Today, I’m an AI-Native Developer at Tenacious, building real solutions in a fast-moving environment.”
Sumeya Sirmula, AI-Native Developer, Tenacious Intelligence Corp

Overview

What is 10 Academy's Intensive Training?

A three-month, project-based program designed to get ambitious people into global AI and data roles fast. Trainees gain real-world experience working on industry challenges while being supported by expert mentors. Since 2017, 10 Academy has graduated over 230 intensive training learners, with a 95% job placement rate, bringing together talent from across Africa, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Benin, Malawi, and Sudan. Supported by organizations including GitLab Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Hopper-Dean Foundation, and Emergent Ventures, 10 Academy has built a strong track record of preparing African talent for high-impact careers in the global technology industry.

What is TRP2?

TRP2 is a selective pathway from graduation to paid, full-time work for high-potential engineers in Ethiopia, including those without prior work experience. The program is designed to:

  • Identify high-potential talent based on capability and attitude. Selection is driven by how you think, learn and execute, and how well you add to our community.
  • Equip you with a modern technology framework for lifelong technology delivery in an AI-first world. You will be trained in modern, AI-first tools, workflows and ways of thinking.
  • Transition top performers into paid, full-time work with Tenacious, supporting clients based around the world, while based in Addis Ababa.

What is Tenacious?

Tenacious Intelligence Corporation is a US-registered AI engineering company with its delivery headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We do two kinds of work. In outsourcing, we place skilled AI engineers, forward-deployed engineers, and data engineers directly into client teams. In consulting, we design, build, and ship AI products for clients end to end. Our team of more than 50 engineers, designers, and delivery leads works with US and Canadian technology companies across loyalty and rewards, fitness and wellness, education, workforce and talent, health and cybersecurity. Tenacious is growing at around 20% per month, and graduates from the first round of TRP already work with us. TRP2 is how we bring the next group of engineers into that growth.

Who Should Apply

  • New or recent graduates with coding/AI experience (no prior work experience required)
  • Available full-time in the program period
  • Based in or able to relocate to Addis Ababa after training (on-site, Hayahulet area)
  • Interested in working in Addis to support international clients

Program Outcomes

TRP2 prepares you for two roles that sit at the centre of how companies now build with AI. Both roles expect you to deliver production work from your first month on the job, and the program is built to get you there.

Role

What you do

Areas you work in

Forward Deployed Engineer

Work embedded inside a client's team, understand their business and their existing systems, and integrate your employer's AI products into them until they work in production

Agentic engineering, software development, data engineering, machine learning engineering

AI Engineer

Design, build and ship AI-based systems for your employer and its clients, from first specification to a measured, maintainable release

Agentic engineering, data engineering, machine learning engineering

On completing TRP2 you leave with:

  • Opportunity to get a job offer at Tenacious, on consulting projects and alongside engineering teams serving North American clients
  • A portfolio of production-grade systems: public repositories, technical reports and measured results you can show any employer
  • 10 Academy Intensive Training Certificate
  • International project exposure: selected graduates work from Tenacious' Addis Ababa office
  • A path to certification and progression: Associate Forward Deployed Engineers work alongside Tenacious's Claude-certified engineers, with the opportunity to progress to a full Forward Deployed Engineer role on passing Anthropic's Claude Certified Architect – Foundations exam

Target Roles

Graduates will be job-ready for AI Engineer and Forward Deployed Engineer roles across data engineering, software engineering and machine learning engineering, building AI systems for companies or deploying them directly with clients. Here are sample roles:

Skills & Tools

Technology Areas Covered

  • Agentic Engineering: design, orchestrate and govern systems of AI agents, from hooks that intercept an agent's tool calls to hierarchical multi-agent teams that audit, extract, research and act on real business tools
  • AI-Native Software Development: write specifications that agents can build from, guide and review AI-generated code, trace every change back to the business intent behind it, and find your way around large codebases you have never seen before
  • Data Engineering: build the data foundations that AI systems depend on, including event stores, data contracts, schema change detection, lineage, and data agents that answer questions across several databases
  • Machine Learning Engineering: treat models as engineering components, which means choosing and routing between them on cost and capability, preparing training and evaluation data, and fine-tuning small models to fix a failure you have measured
  • Evaluation and Reliability: prove that a system works by building test sets and benchmarks, using AI judges carefully, tracing what agents do in production, and showing improvement against a measured baseline

Key Tools, Platforms and Frameworks

You are not expected to know these tools before you start. You will learn them by using them on real projects.

Area

Tools

Platforms and services

Frameworks and methods

Agentic Engineering

Python, MCP, A2A, LangGraph, agent hooks and skills

Anthropic, OpenAI and Google model APIs

Hierarchical multi-agent systems, multi-persona review, human approval gates, kill switches

AI-Native Software Development

Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, code-parsing and graph libraries

GitHub, cloud development machines

Spec-driven development, AWS AI-DLC phase gates, intent-to-code traceability, parallel agents on git worktrees

Data Engineering

Python, SQL, Pydantic, MCP Toolbox for Databases

PostgreSQL, MongoDB, SQLite, DuckDB, Databricks

Event sourcing and CQRS, data contracts, schema drift and blast-radius analysis, data lineage, pipeline incident triage

Machine Learning Engineering

Python, vision-language models, document parsers, Unsloth, LoRA

Model APIs, Google Colab, open-weight models

Confidence-based extraction pipelines, model routing, fine-tuning and preference tuning, structured JSON output

Evaluation and Reliability

Langfuse, Harbor task format, LLM-as-judge

DataAgentBench, τ²-Bench, SWE-bench and Terminal-Bench formats

Benchmark construction from limited data, contamination-resistant test splits, adversarial probing, baseline-and-delta reporting

Production Integration

FastAPI, Playwright

HubSpot, Cal.com, Africa's Talking

Connecting agents to real business tools with tracing, safeguards and audit trails

Engineering Practice

Git, Docker, CI/CD, Linux shell, tmux

GitHub, GitHub Actions

Reproducible environments, test-gated merges, daily research on the moving AI frontier

Across every area you will work with frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, and with open-weight models such as Qwen and DeepSeek. You will learn to choose between them on cost, usage limits and capability, rather than defaulting to one.

Competencies

Career/Delivery Competencies

  • Understanding what a client's business needs, analysing how their systems work today, and communicating it down clearly
  • Getting productive quickly in an unfamiliar production codebase, as a forward-deployed engineer must
  • Turning a vague request into a specification that both people and AI agents can build from
  • Shipping working systems against tight deadlines, in teams with clear roles
  • Explaining technical decisions to technical and non-technical audiences, including what you are still unsure of
  • Keeping up with a fast-moving field through a daily habit of finding and closing your own knowledge gaps

Technical Competencies

  • Building and governing multi-agent systems: hook engines, hierarchical agent teams and multi-persona review
  • Specifying, guiding and reviewing AI-generated code, and keeping a ledger that links each agent action to its business intent
  • Mapping unfamiliar codebases through module graphs, data lineage and semantic analysis before changing them
  • Extracting structured data from documents with pipelines that escalate from fast text parsing to vision models when confidence is low
  • Designing event-sourced systems with CQRS on append-only PostgreSQL event stores
  • Enforcing data contracts, detecting schema drift and estimating the blast radius of a breaking change
  • Engineering context for data agents that query several databases, and measuring them on public benchmarks
  • Connecting agents to real business tools with tracing, approval gates and kill switches
  • Building evaluation sets and benchmarks from limited data, and using AI judges without letting them leak answers
  • Fine-tuning small open-weight models to fix a failure you have measured
  • Choosing and routing between models and coding agents on cost, usage limits and capability
  • Working in Docker-based environments with CI/CD, and building with governance, auditability and compliance in mind

Domains Explored

  • AI-native software engineering
  • Agentic AI and multi-agent systems
  • Document intelligence and unstructured data
  • Data engineering, lineage and governance
  • Enterprise audit and compliance infrastructure
  • B2B sales and revenue operations
  • AI evaluation and benchmarking

Prerequisites

The one thing you must bring is a working mental model of software. You should be able to write code on your own, or at least understand how code is written, run, debugged, connected to a database, split into backend and frontend, and served to users. TRP2 builds on that model. It does not teach it from zero.

Area

What we expect at entry

Helpful, but not required

Software mental model

Explain how a request travels from a browser to a backend, into a database and back; explain the difference between writing, running and deploying code

Having built and deployed a small full-stack application yourself

Python

Write functions and classes; read and debug a project with several files; install packages in a virtual environment; call an API and work with JSON

Type hints, async code, automated tests, building a small command-line tool

SQL

Write joins, filters, grouping and aggregation; design a few tables for a simple business process

Subqueries and CTEs, indexes, transactions, working with more than one database

Command line and Git

Move around a terminal; clone a repository, create a branch, commit and push

Pull requests and code review, Docker, working on a remote Linux machine

AI coding tools

Have used an AI assistant or coding agent to help write code, and checked whether its output was right

A project built mostly with a coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI or Cursor, where you can explain what it got wrong

Quantitative reasoning

Averages, percentages and basic probability; read a chart or results table and question it

Statistics, experiment design, or any prior work with data

Communication

Explain in written English what you built and why

Blog posts, talks, open-source contributions or team projects

Preparation

Want to get ready before applying? We recommend completing our free self-paced courses from JetBrains Academy. These courses cover Python fundamentals, data skills, machine learning, and more, all at your own pace.

View Self-Paced Learning Courses

Project-Based Learning

You learn by building. Most weeks bring a new challenge modelled on work Tenacious engineers do for clients, often with real codebases, real public benchmarks or Tenacious itself as the client. Each project reuses what you built before, so by the end you are combining earlier systems into larger ones rather than starting from scratch.

Phase

Focus

What you build

Foundations

Agentic and AI-native engineering

Agent governance with hooks, a multi-agent code auditor, a document intelligence pipeline, a map of an unfamiliar codebase

Data and context

Data engineering and data agents

An event-sourced ledger, a data contract enforcer, an analytics agent working across several databases and measured on a public benchmark

Production and evaluation

Production agent systems, evaluation and ML engineering

An agent connected to real business tools, a domain benchmark built from limited data, a fine-tuned model that fixes a measured failure

Every project includes:

  • Working code in a repository that you specify, build and review with AI coding agents
  • Interim and final submissions with feedback from tutors and engineers
  • A technical report that explains your design decisions, your measured results and what you would change
  • Portfolio-ready results you can show any employer

Alongside the projects, seminars cover how the AI frontier is moving and how to keep your judgement calibrated as it does. Some projects run in teams with defined roles, the way delivery teams at Tenacious work.

Program Cost & Commitment

The full training program tuition value is USD $2,000.

Selected participants make a commitment contribution of USD $250 (or 45,000 ETB), to be paid by 21 December 2026 (week 4).

The full tuition (USD $2,000) is covered for graduates who are hired by Tenacious and who work at Tenacious for a minimum of 12 months.

The full tuition is payable for graduates that accept a non-Tenacious job earning over $500US/month.

Requirements

Time Commitment

Able to commit Monday to Saturday, 10+ hours per day, for the full duration of the program (30 November 2026 to 26 February 2027). This is not compatible with full-time work or study in parallel.

Technical Equipment

  • Power: a stable supply. The program requires 60 hours of electricity per week (10 hours per day).
  • Laptop (see spec below)
  • Internet: at least 20GB of data per month.
  • Parts of the training run on Google Meet, which works best with at least 3.2 Mbps upload and 1.8 Mbps download.
  • Microphone: your computer should have a working microphone.

Recommended System Specification

Component

Specification

CPU

Intel i5 (minimum), Intel i7 or i9 (ideal); at least four cores

Memory

8GB RAM (minimum), 16GB RAM (ideal)

Storage

512GB solid-state drive (SSD)

Graphics

GPU with 4GB of VRAM (ideal)

Operating system

Recent Ubuntu or other Linux distribution, or macOS High Sierra or later

Contact

For any questions, please contact the cohort manager at support@10academy.org or rodas@10academy.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. TRP2 is open only to residents of Ethiopia with the legal right to work there, as successful graduates will work from the Tenacious office in Addis Ababa.

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