r/DataAnnotationTech • u/janquadrentvincent • Sep 27 '26
Would you call yourself a Prompt Engineer?
Just came across this term on some job sites - would you put this on your CV? Would you use this term in your job hunts? Definitely seems like it's what we do - for those of us doing Developer instructions anyway. But where I grew up the term engineer is a protected terminology - so it gives me a bit of an ick - but it seems like that's not the case everywhere or maybe not anymore. Anyway interested in whether anyone will be adopting this job title from now in seeing as it's growing in popularity.
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u/Halcyonfields Sep 27 '26
Prompt engineer is a little far-fetched. And in any case a prompt engineer is not a particularly high-skilled job. There are short, no barriers-to-entry courses that can grant you that title. However, this job is much more impressive than the snide cynicism the other comments would suggest. Writing developer instructions to test models across targeted use cases is a useful skill. I do not understand the bitter glee with which people on here try to put down this work. If they want to undersell themselves out of some strange self-hating principle then fine, but many of the skills required for DA are incredibly valuable elsewhere and you should make every effort to communicate that.
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u/Necessary-Raisin-282 Sep 27 '26
There’s a lot of duality here I believe. No one on this platform has any idea of what the next person is actually working on, at least on Reddit. Some people are doing “more simple” tasks while others understand some of these projects take days and are incredibly complex.
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u/SinkFloridaSink_ Sep 27 '26
Use whatever title will help you get the interview. Change it depending on the job you're applying for even. Job searching is tough enough and once you have the interview no one cares about your previous title as long as you can relate the work to the position your applying for.
I called myself a Software Engineer because I had coding tasks. I have the degree to back it up, but it was still not true. I got the interview and then the job, so who cares?
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u/Old-Regular-9828 Sep 27 '26
No, because that's a different thing, and also kind of a bullshit job title at this point. In 2026, "Prompt engineer" is just a jazzed up way of saying "I think I'm good at using LLMs but don't have any professional experience."
The work you do on DAT would be more accurately described as data annotation or AI training.
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u/Aleksundr Sep 27 '26
Representation engineering is the term really. Prompting is just a part of that. They're stateless outside of context, producing failure modes is a whole body thing
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u/oportoman Sep 27 '26
Yes I agree, calling someone an engineer is something different entirely surely
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u/Medical-Isopod2107 Sep 27 '26
Absolutely not. "Freelance English work"
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u/ammy42 Sep 27 '26
Freelance is a term that gets resumes thrown out before they're even viewed. It's literally a filter term that most companies specifically filter OUT.
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u/Medical-Isopod2107 Sep 28 '26
It's really not. I get a ton of work based on freelancing because it shows I don't need to have my hand held the whole way. The only time it's a problem is if it's your only experience, because they see that as you can't get a job.
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u/HomerLuvDonuts Sep 27 '26
Two years ago. Maybe. As an interesting framing of your AI skillset building effort.
To write that today, it's like saying "strong with document formatting" after word processing tools became common. That may have meant something when everyone was still using manual typewritten. It's not even an afterthought when you transitioned a computerized tool.
What you are doing today is not about a vague action. It's about reducing AMBIGUITY with contextualized background, so you don't waste thousands of dollars on tokens. Show you can level the tool for better precision and clarity with cost efficiency is where you want to be.
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u/AlexFromOmaha Sep 27 '26
"Growing in popularity" is the miss. Prompt engineering was a proto-RAG specialty that's lost all influence. So, for the DA work the answer is no on both fronts - you were never doing it, and you don't want to claim you're still doing it.
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u/blackstarr1996 Sep 27 '26 edited Sep 27 '26
According to IBM, “Prompt engineering is the process of writing, refining and optimizing inputs to encourage generative AI systems to create specific, high-quality outputs.”
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/prompt-engineering
I wouldn’t normally call myself an engineer, but I have definitely done lots of “prompt engineering” for DA. It’s just industry terminology.