What is an AI Engineer?

Published: July 30th 2025

A new type of software is emerging, that includes parts of it powered by LLMs.

LLMs need context to perform well

This new breed of software has a new skill stack to it

→ prompt engineering
→ retrieval (embeddings and vector search)
→ context engineering
→ agents and agentic design patterns
→ evals to add reliability to non-deterministic flows
→ data analysis

It's an interesting time to be sure.

I feel like these AI powered apps are a real meeting of the machine learning world and that of typical web development

A new type of skill of is becoming useful, that blends skills from the worlds of
→ software engineering/web development
→ data science/data engineering

I've watched UFC a fair amount

Which created a new breed of Mixed Martial Artists with a blend of skills

I keep feeling a bit like this is a new world where, similarly, some MMA type dev skills are going to be important

→ MMA - grappling, stand up and ground game
→ AI Engineer -> software, data and infra

What do you think?