Your prototype answered brilliantly in staging. On Monday morning it fails under load, burns budget on retries, and leaves your team reconstructing a bad customer answer from incomplete logs. That is not a model problem alone - it is an LLM engineering problem.

THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU IF

• You need to take an LLM feature from demo to production without gambling on anecdotes
• You work in software engineering, ML, MLOps, platform, DevOps, or technical leadership
• You need architecture, evaluation, observability, cost control, and release discipline in one place
• You are responsible for systems where latency, cost, safety, and trust actually matter

WHAT THIS BOOK COVERS - END TO END

• Why prototypes fail in production - stack patterns, quality dimensions, failure modes unique to LLMs
• Architecture & data - tokens, transformers, training data pipelines, fine-tuning that is actually justified
• Serving systems - model versioning, API contracts, caching, load balancing, auto-scaling
• Resilience - error taxonomies, retries that do not cascade, timeouts, circuit breakers, graceful degradation
• Quality & delivery - testing pyramids for LLM systems, CI/CD for ML, promotion gates, rollback design
• Operations - cost unit economics, compliance and auditability, monitoring/alerting, troubleshooting ladders
• Scale - capacity planning and architecture for high-traffic LLM workloads

17 CHAPTERS + 2 APPENDICES - Production LLM Engineering Checklists - Reusable LLM Operations Templates and Starter Prompts

CORE PRINCIPLES THIS BOOK REPEATS ON PURPOSE

• Build around the system, not just the model
• Treat prompts as versioned interface logic
• Prefer measurable quality over impressive demos
• Design for fallback, validation, and operator visibility from day one
• Make model, data, and platform decisions explicit enough to audit and improve

Compatible with major providers and open-source models. Written for practitioners who ship.

An LLM is not a product. It is a component inside a larger operational environment - and this book teaches you how to run that environment like an engineer.