Data/ML/AIBackendEmergingAround since 2023
AI Engineer
Also written as LLM Engineer, Applied AI Engineer, GenAI Engineer
Builds products on top of existing AI models rather than training new ones — prompting, retrieval, evaluation, tool use, and the plumbing that makes a model reliable enough to ship.
Think of it like
Like a chef who buys excellent ingredients rather than farming them, and whose skill is entirely in what they do next.
Junior or senior?
Junior sounds like
Has wired up an API and a prompt.
Senior sounds like
Talks about evaluation and failure modes — how they knew it was working, and what they did when it wasn't.
Ask them
“How did you measure whether your AI feature was actually good? What did you do when it regressed?”