Claude Certified Architect — Foundations Certification Exam Guide

Claude Architect Exam Prep

Study guides, flashcards, coding exercises, diagrams, and practice tests — everything you need to pass the Claude Certified Architect — Foundations exam.

Exam Readiness

Study Guide

Flashcards

Visual Diagrams

Course Catalog

Coding Exercises

Practice Exam

External ↗

What's on the Exam

18 topics across 5 weighted domains
D1 Architecture 27%
Agentic loop implementation
stop_reason control flow, tool result handling, termination
Multi-agent orchestration
Coordinator-subagent, task decomposition, parallel execution
Subagent context
Explicit passing, state persistence, crash recovery manifests
Error propagation
Structured errors, transient vs business vs permission
D2 Tools & MCP 18%
Tool interface design
Descriptions, splitting vs consolidating, naming for clarity
MCP tools & resources
Resources for catalogs, tools for actions, description quality
MCP server config
Project vs user scope, env var expansion, multi-server access
Escalation decisions
Explicit criteria, customer preferences, policy gaps
D3 Claude Code 20%
CLAUDE.md hierarchy
User/project/directory levels, @import, .claude/rules/ globs
Commands & skills
Project vs user scope, fork context, allowed-tools, argument-hint
Plan mode vs direct
Complexity assessment, architectural decisions, single-file
Iterative refinement
I/O examples, test-driven, interview pattern
D4 Prompts & Output 20%
Structured output
tool_use schemas, tool_choice config, nullable fields
Few-shot prompting
Ambiguous scenario targeting, format consistency
Batch processing
Message Batches API, latency tolerance, custom_id failures
D5 Context & Reliability 15%
Context optimization
Trim verbose outputs, fact extraction, position-aware ordering
Human review workflows
Confidence calibration, stratified sampling, per-type accuracy
Information provenance
Claim-source maps, temporal data, conflict annotation

About the Exam

What is the Claude Certified Architect — Foundations certification?

The Claude Certified Architect — Foundations certification validates that practitioners can make informed decisions about tradeoffs when implementing real-world solutions with Claude. This exam tests foundational knowledge across Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, the Claude API, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) — the core technologies used to build production-grade applications with Claude.

What kinds of questions are on the exam?

Questions are grounded in realistic scenarios drawn from actual customer use cases, including building agentic systems for customer support, designing multi-agent research pipelines, integrating Claude Code into CI/CD workflows, building developer productivity tools, and extracting structured data from unstructured documents. Candidates must demonstrate not only conceptual knowledge but practical judgment about architecture, configuration, and tradeoffs in production deployments.

Who is this certification designed for?

The ideal candidate is a solution architect who designs and implements production applications with Claude. The candidate typically has 6+ months of practical experience building with Claude APIs, Agent SDK, Claude Code, and MCP, understanding both the capabilities and limitations of large language models in production environments.

What hands-on experience should I have?
  • Building agentic applications using the Claude Agent SDK, including multi-agent orchestration, subagent delegation, tool integration, and lifecycle hooks
  • Configuring and customizing Claude Code for team workflows using CLAUDE.md files, Agent Skills, MCP server integrations, and plan mode
  • Designing Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool and resource interfaces for backend system integration
  • Engineering prompts that produce reliable structured output, leveraging JSON schemas, few-shot examples, and extraction patterns
  • Managing context windows effectively across long documents, multi-turn conversations, and multi-agent handoffs
  • Integrating Claude into CI/CD pipelines for automated code review, test generation, and pull request feedback
  • Making sound escalation and reliability decisions, including error handling, human-in-the-loop workflows, and self-evaluation patterns
How should I prepare?

Use the resources above — the Study Guide covers every domain in depth, Flashcards help with retention via spaced repetition, Visual Diagrams illustrate key architecture patterns, and the Course Catalog maps Anthropic Academy courses to exam domains. Combine these with hands-on experience building with Claude to prepare effectively.

What is the question format?

All questions are multiple choice with one correct response and three distractors. Select the single response that best completes the statement or answers the question. Distractors are options that a candidate with incomplete knowledge or experience might choose.

Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing.

How is the exam scored?

The exam has a pass or fail designation, scored against a minimum standard established by subject matter experts. Results are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 720. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.

What are the content domains and weightings?
  • Domain 1: Agentic Architecture & Orchestration — 27% of scored content
  • Domain 2: Tool Design & MCP Integration — 18% of scored content
  • Domain 3: Claude Code Configuration & Workflows — 20% of scored content
  • Domain 4: Prompt Engineering & Structured Output — 20% of scored content
  • Domain 5: Context Management & Reliability — 15% of scored content
Why was this site built?

I built this site to help myself and others prepare for the Claude Certified Architect exam. It's a collection of the resources, exercises, and study materials I found most useful along the way.