Claude Certified Architect: Professional
An independent study guide for the CCAR-P exam blueprint: solution design, model and prompt engineering, integration, evaluation, governance, stakeholder work and developer enablement. Pitched at architects who already ship systems, and written from scratch. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Anthropic, and it reproduces no exam questions.
8 modules · 40 lessons · 11 hr 13 min · prepares for CCAR-P
3 of 40 lessons are open to read without an account, and a free account opens the other 37. Creating one costs nothing.
Start reading
Starts with: What the CCAR-P exam measures
Modules
- Orientation: what CCAR-P measuresWhat the Professional exam is, how it differs from Foundations, the seven domains and their weights, and how to prepare. Read this first: it also sets out what this guide is and is not.3 lessons43 min
- Domain 1: Solution design and architectureFree account17% of the exam. Turning a business problem into an architecture: end-to-end design with feedback loops, choosing between workflow, agentic and augmented patterns, multi-agent orchestration, decomposition, and tying the result to business value.6 lessons1 hr 45 min
- Domain 2: Models, prompting and context engineeringFree account13% of the exam. Selecting a model on real tradeoffs, designing system prompts and guardrails, applying prompting techniques deliberately, engineering the context window, and reusing prompts through caching and Skills.5 lessons1 hr 24 min
- Domain 3: IntegrationFree accountThe largest domain at 19%. Tool and agent configuration, authentication and authorisation, accuracy against latency, observability at scale, RAG pipeline design, retrieval strategy, connection protocols, and progressive discovery against monolithic context.7 lessons2 hr 3 min
- Domain 4: Evaluation, testing and optimisationFree account16% of the exam. Defining metrics that mean something, building evaluation datasets and mixed-method test frameworks, running A/B tests, diagnosing failures to the right cause, and optimising the cost, latency and quality triangle.6 lessons1 hr 41 min
- Domain 5: Governance, safety and risk managementFree account14% of the exam. Guardrails and safety controls, the real failure modes of language model systems, human-in-the-loop validation, regulated environments, and the ethical considerations an architect is expected to raise.5 lessons1 hr 26 min
- Domain 6: Stakeholder communication and lifecycleFree account14% of the exam, and the domain engineers most often underestimate. Structured discovery, communicating a tradeoff to someone who wanted the other option, managing expectations and SLAs, documenting a design, and carrying a system through its lifecycle.5 lessons1 hr 24 min
- Domain 7: Developer productivity and operational enablementFree accountThe smallest domain at 7%. Configuring Claude tooling for a team rather than an individual, improving developer workflow with AI assistance, and supporting debugging and operational resolution.3 lessons47 min