1. What are you working toward? Choose role or outcome closest to your goal.
AI engineer Build strong foundations and your first complete AI applications. Production ML engineer Build validated data, training, deployment, and monitoring pipelines. RAG and search engineer Build retrieval, reranking, evaluation, and secure knowledge systems. Agent engineer Build reliable tool-using agents with memory, recovery, and review. Inference engineer Run models with deliberate latency, throughput, and cost tradeoffs. Model training engineer Learn data pipelines, adaptation, alignment, and distributed training. AI research scientist Design controlled experiments, study model behavior, and evaluate new methods rigorously. AI lab candidate Prepare for coding, systems design, eval, and technical interviews.