Artificial Intelligence

AI Engineer

From embeddings and vector search to prompt engineering, fine-tuning, evals, and agentic systems.

Progression:0%
0 / 7 Milestones Mastered
L1

1. Beginner

Foundations of modern AI, LLMs, and Python tooling.

Python for AI & Async Programming

essential

Type hints, Pydantic data validation, async HTTP clients, numpy basics.

Pydantic V2Asyncio event loopsTokenization principlesOpenAI SDK
L2

2. Foundation

Embeddings, vector databases, and similarity search.

Vector Embeddings & Semantic Search

essential

Cosine similarity, dot product, HNSW indexing, chunking strategies.

Chunk overlappgvector / QdrantHNSW graph searchHybrid search with BM25
L3

3. Core Skills

Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

Production RAG Systems

essential

Query re-writing, rerankers (Cohere), contextual compression, hallucination guards.

Cross-encoders / RerankingHyDE (Hypothetical Document Embeddings)Context window optimization
L4

4. Framework

Agent architectures and tool calling.

Autonomous Agents & Function Calling

essential

ReAct loop, function calling schemas, structured outputs, multi-agent orchestrations.

ReAct loopTool definition schemaState machines (LangGraph)Error recovery
L5

5. Real Projects

Ship an interactive enterprise agent.

Autonomous Code Review & Refactoring Agent

essential

Git diff analysis, AST parsing, automated lint fixes, PR generation.

AST inspectionIterative self-correctionTool sandboxing
L6

6. Advanced

Evaluations, observability, and fine-tuning.

LLM Evals & Tracing (LangSmith / Phoenix)

essential

Ground truth datasets, LLM-as-a-judge, token latency budgets, LoRA / QLoRA fine-tuning.

LLM-as-a-judgeRagas metrics (Faithfulness, Recall)QLoRA fine-tuningvLLM serving
L7

7. Interview Prep

AI system architecture, scaling embeddings, and cost reduction.

AI System Design

essential

Designing enterprise document search over 50M PDF pages with real-time permissions.

Document ACL filteringCaching LLM responsesStreaming SSE latency

Hands-on Portfolio Projects for this Roadmap

Multimodal Enterprise Search with Hybrid Vector Retrieval
Autonomous SQL Data Analyst Agent with Schema Discovery
Production LLM Evaluation Suite with Automated Regressions