# AI Engineer

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

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

<figure><img src="/files/kwzRDZUmQkCI0A4WVqnb" alt="ai engineer"><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

## 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


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://jamiewen00.gitbook.io/ai-engineering-handbook/roles-and-teams/ai-engineer.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.
