Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?

I'm seeing an enormous contingency of my LinkedIn connections change their titles to "AI Engineer." I know for a fact that they're not working on any models or even AI workflows, they're just building apps and backends using AI tools like Claude.

Is that what "AI Engineer" means nowadays? Is that what companies are looking for when they open recs for "AI Engineer"? Should I be marketing myself as an "AI Engineer" just because I'm very efficient using modern AI tooling to build good non-AI software?

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It doesn't mean anything. The very title "engineer" is a massive scam to begin with, especially in places like the United States where it's neither a protective title or credentialed. Any asshole can call themselves an engineer and nobody bats an eye at the absurdity.

When employers invent these titles like "AI engineer", they're looking for tech geeks who check off the keywords du jour. It's no different from the now defunct "blockchain engineer" of yesteryear. It's about broadcasting a particular skillset without really having anything to do with actual engineering. I guarantee you that the role of an AI engineer at one company will look very different in another – because it's not real.

I don't think you can call yourself an accredited civil, mechanical, etc., engineer, even in the US. However, you can call yourself a software engineer nearly anywhere because it isn't the same thing - no regulatory body is going to stop people from making a website.

There are definitely regions where "engineer" is protected in such a way that "software engineer" isn't kosher (some provinces in Canada, for example)

I remember it was like that but it was kind of silly. You had "Software Engineers" working alongside "Software Developers" doing exactly the same job. The purpose of the P.Eng. was to protect the public, not people's egos.

this kind of gatekeeping is cringe

yea i know there are PE exams and certs

doesn’t change the fact that it’s cringe

no amount of down votes can convince me otherwise

Work with some chukelfucks that don't know what they're doing and have no standards, and the cringe will go in the other direction. The gatekeeper serves a purpose. It's not arbitrary. We don't want bridges that fall down nor skyscrapers. Cars shouldn't randomly explode, either.

true. thankfully i’ve limited my exposure to annoying terribads like that.

When the hype cycle for "technology x" is in full swing, everybody becomes a "x engineer", sometimes without even knowing. According to some of my previous employers, I've been an "engineer" in areas such as information security, development using specific languages and/or frameworks and the like. This was of course more performative than anything else - no reputable dev shop would be caught dead not having a couple blockchain engineers on call when the customer demands.

IMHO, it not only means nothing at all, it also could mean nothing in several different ways. For example, if you take "AI engineer" to mean "someone who uses AI as a tool in their daily job as a software developer", then I'm also a "chair engineer", "coffee engineer" and "keyboard engineer" as well, since I consider those essential to be able to design and code, even if they're not part of the deliverable. Or you could go the way of champagne - "engineer is anyone who is registered by this engineering council/association, and this is done by filling certain requirements in matters of education and/or professional status".

An AI Engineer is just a mid level experienced SWE who wants to be hired in 2025-26.

If you did not get the above statement, people who changed their title to "AI Engineer" found it more easy to get jobs, at least from what I have seen.

I like these definitions:

- AI Engineer: an engineer who builds software that makes use of LLMs and other AI models, and maybe trains models (but not required)

- Agentic Engineer: an engineer who makes use of AI tools like coding agents when writing software.

AI Engineer was quite well established in the last few years to that first meaning, mainly thanks to swyx in 2023: https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer - which then lead to the popular AI Engineer Summit / World's Fair series of events https://www.ai.engineer/

But this year coding agents have become much more widely spread (the category didn't exist when AI Engineer was coined in 2023), so there's a possibility the term is being redefined to describe people who use those. I think that's a bad redefinition, personally.

("Agentic Engineer" is much less widely used, there may be other names for that category of engineer that I've not encountered yet.)

Considering 99% of engineers are using AI tools, that would mean all engineers are now "Agentic Engineers." Are we really no longer putting any value on someone who has expertise in understanding the code it produces?

Right, that's why I don't think that class particularly needs a name. It's trending towards "software engineers" now.

We need a name for engineers who don't use coding agents.

AI engineer: makes API calls to a hosted LLM.

ML engineer: builds models and deploys them.

Hosted models have eaten a lot of the domain of ML but the difference is pretty clear in industries like recommendation, where LLMs are slower, less accurate, and cannot be personalized, not to mention orders of magnitude more expensive.

Agentic engineer would be someone who builds agents not just someone who uses them. Anyone can use Claude code.

"Anyone can use Claude code"

I'll happily push back against that. Using Claude Code and similar tools effectively is way, way harder than people expect.

Anyone can pick up a guitar and strum the strings, but it takes a whole lot of work to actually get good with it.

> I'll happily push back against that. Using Claude Code and similar tools effectively is way, way harder than people expect.

No it's actually not that difficult. Even if you are not a "prompt engineer" you will get out what is needed from claude if you use simple logic (no need to be technical). In fact this whole "Prompt Engineering" scam will go extinct soon, as SOTA LLM's already catching up on most edge cases and prompting issues.

> Anyone can pick up a guitar and strum the strings, but it takes a whole lot of work to actually get good with it.

Really the wrong analogy here. You are comparing a human who learned guitar through years of practice. When with AI who itself already knows how to play. You're not learning an instrument. You're more like someone who just hired a virtuoso musician. Yes, you need to tell them what song you want,but you don't need to teach them chord progressions. The model already knows the hard part.

In my mind, an AI Engineer builds products on top of LLMs, integrating them into real software (RAG, agents, evals, inference/prompt infra).

Using Claude or Copilot to write your otherwise-normal app isn't that. That's a dev with good tooling, the same way an IDE doesn't make you an "IDE Engineer" or Google a "Search Engineer." You don't title yourself after your tools.

Most of the LinkedIn relabels are that second group borrowing the title. Nothing wrong with using AI in your day to day, especially when you understand the concepts underneath, know what it does well, and know what it doesn't. But that and "makes use of LLMs in what they build" still aren't the same job.

At Databricks they’re responsible for the creation, care, and feeding of the AI agents we have in production. As these start to perform real use cases, you have to ensure they’re actually delivering the outcomes they were designed to do… and don’t drift. More often than not they’re resolving upstream data/context issues and now cost optimization with model selection and testing.

Doesn't matter, the title means nothing. What you can do does. If you can do something, does it matter what your title is?

Probably the only correct answer is to look at the job description under the title. Job titles in software engineering have always been flexible. What matters is what they actually want you to do. Even better is if you can figure out what problem they’re trying to solve because there can be better ways.

As for whether you should market yourself that way, I personally think your actual experience matters way more because most companies also haven’t hired many “AI engineers” before.

Here are a few job descriptions for reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975744

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48099785

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978246

I wrote an entire blogpost about this ridiculous phenomenon:

https://gavinray97.github.io/blog/absurdity-of-ai-engineer-t...

I think "They wanted an engineer to build a chatbox that called ChatGPT with company documents as prompt context" fits the term "AI Engineer", personally - see https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer which uses it for "applied" AI.

Why would a self-described "AI Engineer" be any more capable of building that sort of functionality over any other backend engineer, especially one who is familiar with agent-assisted development?

Because building on top of LLMs is really tricky. You need to understand things like writing evals, configuring agentic loops, creating and iterating on system prompts, designing tools that work well with LLMs.

It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.

Being familiar with agent-assisted development helps a little bit because at least you understand prompts, but there's a whole lot more to building software on top of LLMs than that.

Any engineer can get familiar with these things of course, just like any engineer can figure out what it takes to work on payment systems.

  > It's a speciality, just like being a payments engineer who integrates with systems like Stripe is a speciality.

At $PREV_JOB, we had physical Point-of-Sales systems as well as a mobile app, and provided multi-merchant marketplace functionality with things like disbursement reports and support for multiple bank accounts for vendors.

I had to migrate all of this from Braintree to Stripe. It probably encompasses the most complex payment system I've worked on in my career.

But that's not a job title, it's just part of "make the app work"

At my $PREV_JOB we would have called you a payments engineer for that.

I don't think AI Engineer is an exclusive job title. If anything, coding agents are pushing us all to become generalists much more so than before.

You don't call someone who integrates the Twilio API a "Twilio Engineer", or Mailchimp a "Mailchimp engineer"

Integrating third-party libraries to build an application is a significant chunk of the work in any SaaS product and the expectation is you can read the vendor docs and figure it out

I think the difference here is that it's possible to know bowering there is to know about the Twilio API. Read the docs, build a few things and you can consider yourself to have mastered that entirely.

Nobody on earth can tell you that they've "mastered" the art of building software on top of LLMs.

They're weird. They don't behave like other APIs. They're non-deterministic and unpredictable and not even the people who created them fully understand what they can and cannot do.

(For one thing, if someone claims to have mastered LLMs ask them how they would 100% protect against prompt injection attacks...)

Engineering involves assuming liability. I can't see how anyone can rationally assume liability for the output of any current LLM or anything likely to emerge in the near future.

Used to mean building models. Now it means you figured out which system prompt stops GPT from hallucinating your product name. The bar moved fast.

The definition is definitely changing.. or the way people are using it. AI PM used to mean something very different than what it does now as well!

AI Engineer It doesn't mean anything

Somebody soon to lose their job?

“AI Engineer” is already out-of-date. You need to be an “AI GTM engineer”.

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