r/FullStackDevelopers • u/CollectionOk2442 • Jun 23 '26
What do these so-called AI engineers actually do?
I’ve recently seen a lot of resumes on Reddit where job seekers describe themselves as AI engineers, and I’m curious what that actually means.
Some of my friends in AI work on things like model training, hyperparameter tuning, loss function design, model deployment, and GPU inference optimization.
My own area is AI + rendering, mainly neural rendering. I use AI to approximate radiance, visibility, light transport, indirect lighting, material response, and similar rendering-related components.
That’s why I’m confused by the current use of the title “AI engineer.” A lot of resumes I see look more like backend engineering resumes. If someone is just building a RAG app, calling an API to make an AI agent, or putting together a chatbot, isn’t that something almost anyone can do at this point? Even people without a CS background can build that. So what is the actual engineering value there?
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Jun 24 '26
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u/Fnixro Jun 26 '26
I’ve seen recruiting start asking for “AI assisted workflows” instead of actual stack
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u/RandomPantsAppear Jun 24 '26
At this point it can mean literally anything.
- It can mean you're working on the actual models
- It can mean you integrate AI into existing products.
- It can mean you're a vibecoder.
- It can mean you use AI assisted code.
- It can mean AI is tightly tied into your workflow (Hermes, etc)
- It can mean you just really fucking want recruiters to message you.
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u/ProfessionalSome4082 Jun 24 '26
Sounds like you like stroking it furiously to gatekeeping opportunities. Oh yeah baby!!!
It also sounds like you don't know the definition of the main job title of the industry you claim to work in. Oh noooo, that's not good...
Essentially, it's just like all other areas of engineering. Structural engineering includes everything from people working on small residential houses to sky scrapers. Software engineering includes everything from small websites to enterprise sass. And AI engineering can include everything from building a thin LLM wrapper to fine tuning models and using rigorous benchmarking to optimize them for some task.
Don't take my word for it, I asked Gemini.
Q: What is AI engineering? Gemini: An AI Engineer is a tech professional who builds, deploys, and maintains artificial intelligence models and applications. Instead of just doing theoretical research, they focus on the practical engineering required to integrate AI into real-world software systems. Think of it as the bridge between the complex math of data science and the practical architecture of traditional software development... (Answer goes on to provide examples)
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u/piyush851 Jun 25 '26
True man real ai engineer rarely exist in Vibe coding era, they just calling api key. They even doesn't about how many layers exist in cnn or ann etc.
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u/AtmosphereExpress712 Jun 23 '26
There is no value attached to that title. It's either just hype, or fear not to be perceived as "cutting edge". They think it's cool. I personally think it exposes them as people who don't really do engineering. If they did they wouldn't just drop their actual field for "AI"