Technical · Very high demand

AI Engineer

Builds AI features into real products — models, retrieval, agents and the plumbing that keeps them reliable.

What people earn

Entry

$85k–$110k

Mid-level

$120k–$170k

Senior

$180k–$260k+

Ranges are US-weighted; expect 30–50% lower in most of Europe and higher in the Bay Area.

1
Foundations
Finish the 21-day AI certification so the fundamentals are solid.
2
Tooling
Complete Cursor Academy and GitHub Copilot Academy to advanced level.
3
Build
Complete Lovable Academy and ship two working apps.
4
Depth
Work through OpenAI Academy to master, including evaluation and governance.
5
Evidence
Publish three graded portfolio projects with evaluation results.

OpenAI Academy

ChatGPT, GPT models and the wider OpenAI toolkit, end to end.

Cursor Academy

An editor that writes code with you, not for you.

GitHub Copilot Academy

Autocomplete that finishes your thought, in every editor.

Lovable Academy

Describe an app, get a real one, ship it the same day.

Claude Academy

Long documents, careful reasoning and writing that sounds human.

How do you know your AI feature actually works?

Describe a test set, a rubric, a baseline score and a bar for shipping changes.

Walk me through a time the model failed.

Name the failure mode, whether it was loud or silent, and the guard you added.

How do you control cost?

Talk about staging, caching, model choice and measuring cost per successful outcome.