🦉
AI Engineering Handbook
About
  • Hey
  • Tech Stack
  • ML to AI Shift
  • Agentic Systems
  • Anti Patterns
  • AI Engineer
  • Roles Reimagined
  • Dream Team
  • System
    • Architecture
    • Start Simple
    • Enhance Context
    • Implement Guardrails
    • Add Routing and Gateway
    • Optimise with Caching
    • Enable Agent Patterns
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  • 🎯 Responsibilities
  • Application Development
  • Prompt Engineering
  • Evaluation Systems
  • Infrastructure Operations
  • Data Engineering
  • 🛠️ Essential Skills
  • AI-Specific Knowledge
  • Product Development
  • ➡️ ML Engineer to AI Engineer
  • ➡️ Product Engineer to AI Engineer

AI Engineer

Software engineers who master LLMs. They build AI applications and ship features.

Product-minded. Design-aware. Full-stack. Focused on business outcomes.

🎯 Responsibilities

Application Development

  • Build AI apps using foundation models

  • Create LLM interfaces

  • Integrate AI into products via APIs

Prompt Engineering

  • Write effective prompts

  • Build context systems

  • Manage memory for conversations

Evaluation Systems

  • Select models

  • Benchmark progress

  • Detect production issues

  • Build evaluation frameworks

Infrastructure Operations

  • Optimise inference speed and cost

  • Manage model serving

  • Monitor performance

  • Handle compute clusters

Data Engineering

  • Curate datasets

  • Process unstructured data

  • Implement retrieval systems

  • Control data quality

🛠️ Essential Skills

AI-Specific Knowledge

  • Prompt engineering techniques

  • Model selection strategies

  • Model evaluation methold

  • Model fine-tuning approaches

Product Development

  • UX development for AI interfaces

  • Experimentation workflows

  • Business outcome measurement

  • Problem-solving with AI

➡️ ML Engineer to AI Engineer

From Model Training to Orchestration

  • Before: Train models from scratch

  • After: Orchestrate existing foundation models

From Data-First to Product-First

  • Before: Collect data, then build

  • After: Build fast, validate, then optimise

From Research to Application

  • Before: Design algorithms

  • After: Build user experiences

➡️ Product Engineer to AI Engineer

AI-Specific Knowledge

  • Learn: LLM capabilities and limits

  • Develop: Prompt engineering skills

  • Understand: Model selection

Data Handling Skills

  • Expand: Unstructured data processing

  • Master: Context retrieval

  • Build: Data quality workflows

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Last updated 6 days ago