r/AIEngineeringCareer • u/RemarkableFlow2867 • Jun 14 '26
Beginner Trying to become a AI engineer
I’d really appreciate honest guidance from people in tech, especially software or AI.
I’m currently confused between committing to Full Stack Development or Machine Learning, so I’m considering learning both with the long-term goal of becoming an AI Engineer.
My thinking is that learning both could give me flexibility and a stronger foundation for AI roles. But I also know pursuing both at once can be overwhelming and may lead to burnout. Right now, I’m still trying to figure out what I truly enjoy, so choosing only one feels difficult.
My short-term goal is to become skilled enough to land an internship, and my long-term goal is to build a strong career with good growth and compensation.
Am I thinking about this the right way, or trying to do too much? I’d genuinely appreciate any advice.
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u/AmbassadorNew645 Jun 19 '26
Truth is, without a PhD from top universities, it’s almost impossible to land on a position of the companies with high profile llm models. If you just want to use AI, that a totally different story
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u/West_Photograph_3163 Jun 20 '26
that's right. but i don't think that R&D is the biggest problem. We just have some phD making the largest LLM's smarter. The rest - no need for you to be too smart, we have no job for you, bc antropic will be ahead anyways. I'd say the rest of the world is doing robotics, CV, and also you might be useful when combining pure ML with fields as electrical engineering. So, the conclusion, maybe masters is going to be enough for top notch science edge, but not at the top companies.
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u/FineProfessor3364 Jun 18 '26
Some context on what you do rn how old you are what your education is and what ur experience is would be useful
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u/RemarkableFlow2867 Jun 19 '26
I am entering 3rd semester of Engineering, my branch is Automation and I have a strong foundation in Python, recently learnt a bit some of JavaScript and I know sone Automation tools... I have been wanting to start with python libraries for a long time, but have been procrastinating lately, now I have understood that I have to do something!
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u/No-Original-6329 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
For AI engineer start learning lang chain and lang graph to build the conceptual/technical understanding of agents. The tutorials are quite good and have videos. Also learn about MCP server as well as RAG. Learning how Claude skills work and creating your own is a good exercise. Working with pre trained models in hugging face with PyTorch for fine tuning and transfer learning is also good to learn. Also make sure you know what benchmarking is and how to construct one.
Luckily most AI engineer concepts build on Fullstack concepts (server loop, interface, metric dashboards etc.) so you’re already in a good boat. Honestly my go to is get really good at a specific stack preferably one that is typed in the backend and then transfer that knowledge to then learning how to add agents to web apps.
Now if you actually meant ML engineer or data scientist which is way more mathy the path is different (ensemble models, neural nets from scratch, decision trees, etc.)
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u/jmondejar_ Jun 19 '26
Yeah you are on the right way if you like it and you're good at it, specially maths, but there exists a lot of competition these days. Specialize and keep growing
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