Launching the Synthetic Signal Associate Program
A founding cohort of ten will spend eleven weeks learning to build with Claude, with three in-person build days in London along the way.
Today we are opening applications for the Synthetic Signal Associate Program: a fully funded, eleven-week programme that takes ten people from their first prompt to the Anthropic Claude Certified Architect, Foundations (CCA-F) exam. Synthetic Signal is Negative Zero's Claude consulting arm, and this is its founding cohort.
The programme is for graduates, junior professionals and career-changers moving into AI and cyber security. No prior Claude experience is required. What we ask for is curiosity, a comfort with technical work and roughly six to eight hours a week from mid-July to the end of September 2026.
Learning by building
Most training in this field is a course you watch. We wanted a programme you build your way through, alongside people working on the same problems at the same time. So the curriculum is organised around what associates make, and every phase ends with something they can show.
Alongside the self-paced work, associates get mentorship from the Negative Zero team and the whole cohort learns together. The question someone hits in week two is usually the question everyone hits in week two, and the fastest way through it is as a group.
Three build days in Central London
Once a month the cohort meets in person for a full day of building with Claude. We cover the travel. The three days mark out the shape of the programme.
These days are the heart of the programme. Pairing with someone who has already solved the problem you are stuck on compresses a week of reading into an afternoon, and presenting your own work to a room is the quickest way to find out what you actually understand.
What associates take away
At the end of September, each associate sits the CCA-F exam: a proctored, closed-book paper of around sixty questions covering agentic architecture, Claude Code, prompt engineering, MCP and tool design, and context management. No AI assistance is allowed during the exam. The credential says you can reason about these systems yourself.
Associates also leave with a portfolio project and a written case study, the Negative Zero identity they built it under, and a network of nine other people who went through the same eleven weeks.
Why Negative Zero is doing this
Negative Zero builds agentic swarms that keep organisations secure and compliant, and we are a member of the Claude Partner Network. Many of the people who will build the next generation of these systems are not yet working in the field. Some are finishing degrees, some are a few years into unrelated careers, and most have never been given the time and the tools to learn properly. The Associate Program is our attempt to change that for ten of them, and to learn from them how we should run it next.
Read the curriculum and apply at syntheticsignal.io/associate.
