Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know before you start The role is closer than it looks. In 2026 an AI engineer mostly deploys and integrates pretrained models — large language models above all — rather than training models from scratch. That is software engineering with new tools. Most of your backend skills transfer. API design, latency and cost budgeting, retries, queues, caching, observability and CI/CD all carry over directly. The new surface area is prompting, retrieval, evaluation, agents and vector stores. Eval literacy is the number-one hiring signal. Knowing how to design, run and reason about model evaluations is the clearest proof you have shipped with LLMs rather than watched tutorials. Ninety focused days is enough to be interview-ready if your software fundamentals are already strong.…
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