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Level 3 · Ph.D

Ph.D Advanced Automation

Automation · Live · v0

Doctoral automation — orchestration at scale, self-healing systems, and research-grade reliability engineering.

Path type

Automation

Requirements

MSc Advanced Automation

Enrollment

€19.95

Deadline

Next cohort starts 2027-09-06 (AY 2027/28)

Length

+1 year · 56 phases

Language

English · Español

Content freshness

Curriculum updated 2026-08-23 · content rev 8d6e0676

Cortex Credits (CC)

280 CC
What are Cortex Credits?

Syllabus

View the phase syllabus

0. Foundations & tooling
1. What "advanced automation" means: rigor over recipes
2. The shipd delivery system, recapped & instrumented
3. Research method: reproducible experiments on a pipeline
4. The algebra of pipelines: determinism, idempotence & purity
5. Build systems as computation: the build graph & content addressing
6. Hermetic & reproducible builds, bit-for-bit
7. Caching theory: correctness, keys & invalidation
8. Incremental & distributed builds & the critical path
9. Dependency resolution as constraint solving
10. Supply-chain integrity I: provenance, SLSA & in-toto
11. Test theory, revisited: oracles, adequacy & economics
12. Coverage criteria & their limits
13. Property-based & metamorphic testing
14. Mutation testing & the coupling effect
15. Fuzzing: coverage-guided & structure-aware
16. Deterministic simulation testing
17. Distributed-systems testing: linearizability & Jepsen-style checking
18. Model checking & lightweight formal methods
19. Performance testing as experiment: queueing theory & percentile math
20. CI as a distributed system: the integration problem
21. Merge queues & the not-rocket-science rule
22. Predictive CI: regression test selection & prioritization
23. Flaky-test science: detection, quantification & quarantine
24. Pipeline performance: critical-path analysis at scale
25. Hermetic CI & remote build execution
26. Monorepo automation: affected-target graphs at scale
27. The mathematics of deployment risk
28. Deployment strategies as control problems
29. Canary analysis & automated statistical gating
30. Feature flags & progressive delivery as a control plane
31. Control theory for delivery & autoscaling
32. Reproducible & immutable artifacts: OCI internals
33. Supply-chain integrity II: signing, verification & admission policy
34. Release engineering: versioning, automated releases & rehearsed rollback
35. Infrastructure as Code: desired-state convergence, formally
36. The state problem: drift, locking & convergence guarantees
37. GitOps & the reconciliation control loop
38. Policy as Code & admission control
39. Secrets & identity: short-lived credentials & zero-standing-privilege
40. Platform engineering & the internal developer platform
41. Self-service & the abstraction of automation
42. Observability theory: pillars, cardinality & cost
43. eBPF & low-overhead instrumentation
44. SLIs, SLOs & error budgets: the math
45. Alerting theory: signal, noise & burn-rate windows
46. Capacity planning & forecasting
47. Chaos engineering & resilience testing
48. Auto-remediation & closed-loop control
49. DevSecOps: security gates without blocking delivery
50. Pipeline reliability & the meta-pipeline
51. Measuring delivery performance: DORA, SPACE & the science of it
52. The research frontier & posing an original contribution
53. Capstone I: the integrated thesis pipeline
54. Capstone II: the doctoral publication (PhD conferral gate)
55. Hardening, postmortem, "What's next" & portal integration
56. Inheriting a system you did not build
57. Operating the cluster
58. Accelerators as a rationed resource
59. On-call as a designed system
60. Incident command over probabilistic systems
61. Blameless postmortem practice
62. Capacity & cost governance end to end
63. Stateful AI operations
64. Tier capstone: the game day

Syllabus →

Enrolment prerequisites

• A verified account and admissions-committee approval.
• Completion of MSc Advanced Automation.