Microsoft and CMU Start PRAISE, a Certificate for Early-Career Engineers Working With AI

Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University have started a certificate program that puts early-career Microsoft software engineers through CMU courses while senior engineers mentor them, both organisations said Oct. 15. It is called PRAISE, short for Preceptorship for AI-accelerated Software Engineering, and it began this fall semester.

CMU's news article says the idea came from an October 2025 visit to its School of Computer Science by Mark Russinovich, who is Chief Technology Officer, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer and Technical Fellow for Microsoft Azure. Microsoft's own Command Line post, which Russinovich co-wrote with Scott Hanselman, a vice president and Member of Technical Staff at Microsoft, describes the model as borrowed from nursing.

What a junior engineer actually takes

The participants are Microsoft engineers. CMU lists four courses, split across two semesters.

Term	Course
Fall 2026	Machine Learning in Production
Fall 2026	Preceptorship in AI-Augmented Software Engineering I
Spring	DevOps: Engineering for Secure Development and Deployment
Spring	Second half of the Preceptorship sequence

CMU says the courses can count toward a master's in software engineering at the School of Computer Science. Microsoft's post calls that school the Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science; CMU's article uses the shorter name.

Jonathan Aldrich, a professor in the Software and Societal Systems Department, directs the certificate. Michael Hilton, a teaching professor in that department, is quoted on both pages. In Microsoft's post he is identified as its Associate Department Head for Education.

The argument both pages make about juniors

The reasoning is about what junior engineers no longer do. "It used to be that early-career software engineers would do a lot of tasks that would build up their expertise," Hilton said in Microsoft's post. If an agent now does those tasks, the learning has to come from somewhere else.

Russinovich is quoted by CMU saying "AI changes the work, but it doesn't eliminate the need for junior engineers or for human judgment and accountability." Microsoft's post puts it as "AI changes the work; it does not remove human responsibility for outcomes." It also says the goal is not to keep newcomers coding as though AI never arrived.

The preceptor's job, per Microsoft, is to share insight and taste, explain approaches, suggest where to focus, and coach on using AI thoughtfully and on systems thinking. Microsoft says it believes software careers will persist and that today's juniors become tomorrow's senior engineers.

Who it reaches and what is missing

CMU profiles Jace Watson, a Microsoft software engineer in Seattle who joined to build his AI tooling skills. The profile reads as a single participant's story: he is the only participant CMU names.

Neither page gives a cohort size, a cost, a number of hours a week or an eligibility rule. CMU's article says only that it hopes to grow the program and add students. The spring courses are scheduled but undated.

For an engineer inside Microsoft, the missing numbers decide the practical question: how the coursework fits around the day job. For an engineer outside it, nothing in either announcement says the program is open. Other recent Microsoft and developer-tooling coverage: the October Patch Tuesday count and the Tsc-ts compiler port.

The next date on the schedule is the spring term, when DevOps: Engineering for Secure Development and Deployment opens. Neither page gives its start.