LEARNING PATH · AI Engineering

Become an AI Engineer

For developers building real features on top of LLMs.

Intermediate ~5h 15m14 lessons17 steps

From prompting to retrieval to agents to evaluation and serving — the full arc of shipping LLM-powered features, threaded through handbooks, system designs, runnable challenges and tools.

  • Structure prompts and LLM calls that hold up in production
  • Build a retrieval pipeline from chunking to ranked context
  • Design agent + tool-calling systems and evaluate them honestly
  • Reason about inference cost, latency and serving at scale
0 / 14 done · 0%
  1. HandbookNext up

    The Prompting Handbook

    Start at the interface to every model — prompting.

  2. Paper Breakdown

    Attention Is All You Need

    See what you’re actually prompting — the Transformer, explained.

  3. ToolTool · optional

    Context Budget & Cost Planner

    Feel how context length drives latency and cost.

  4. AI System Design

    Design a RAG Pipeline

    The canonical RAG architecture, end to end.

  5. AI System Design

    Design a Vector Database

    Go inside the vector store: IVF, HNSW, ANN search.

  6. Challenge

    Cosine Similarity

    Implement the similarity metric retrieval runs on.

  7. Challenge

    Top-K Retrieval

    Rank documents by similarity — the “R” in RAG.

  8. ToolTool · optional

    RAG Chunking Playground

    Tune chunking and watch retrieval quality shift.

  9. AI System Design

    Design Semantic Search

    Assemble it all: embeddings, hybrid retrieval, reranking.

  10. AI System Design

    Design an AI Agent System

    Move from single calls to tool-using agents.

  11. AI System Design

    Design Multi-Agent Orchestration

    Coordinate many agents with a durable workflow engine.

  12. ToolTool · optional

    Tool-Schema Designer

    Design the tool interfaces agents call.

  13. Handbook

    The Agent Evaluations Handbook

    Evaluate agents — the hard part of shipping them.

  14. Challenge

    Token-Level F1

    Implement a real eval metric by hand.

  15. Handbook

    The Loop Engineering Handbook

    Then stop prompting — design the loops that run your agents unattended.

  16. AI System Design

    Design an LLM Inference Server

    Serve models at scale: batching, KV-cache.

  17. Handbook

    The Senior AI Engineer Interview Handbook

    Tie it together at senior scope.

What this path builds toward

AI engineering isn't one skill — it's a stack. This path walks it in the order the work actually happens: start at the prompt, the interface to every model; add retrieval so the model answers from real data; move to agents that take actions through tools; then the two things that separate a demo from a product — honest evaluation and cost-aware serving at scale.

Each step is a concrete artifact — a system design you can reason about, a tool you can play with, a metric you implement by hand — not a video to watch. By the end you'll be able to take an idea from "call an LLM" to a grounded, agentic, evaluated feature you'd be comfortable shipping.

← All learning paths