WTF is AI Engineer?
A software engineer who builds products on top of foundation models, rather than training models.
Also called: ai engineering
TL;DR
You don't need a PhD to build with AI. An AI engineer wires models into real products using APIs, prompts, tools, RAG, evals and agents. The role sits between traditional software engineering and machine learning research.
How it works
The argument: as foundation models became available via API, most value shifted from training models to applying them. That created a new engineering discipline with its own stack (orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, observability) and its own skills (context engineering, tool design, cost and latency trade-offs).
Origin
- Coined / introduced by
- swyx (Latent Space)
- When
- 30 Jun 2023
- Story
- Popularised by the essay 'The Rise of the AI Engineer'.