[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Anyone is an "AI Engineer"? What does your j...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Ask HN: Anyone is an "AI Engineer"? What does your job tasks
       include?
        
       Can you describe what your day looks like? What do you work on,
       what skills do you have?
        
       Author : akudha
       Score  : 8 points
       Date   : 2025-07-01 21:12 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
       | valbaca wrote:
       | I've effectively become the "AI expert" on my team, but I still
       | hold my same title (Sr SWE).
       | 
       | Being very familiar with Bedrock and its related APIs, in
       | particular:
       | 
       | - running accuracy and related metrics
       | 
       | - building RAG solutions using Knowledge Bases, separating in the
       | response and in the flows what is and what isn't AI-generated
       | 
       | - adding Bedrock Guardrails to catch the "bad stuff" and using
       | Bedrock Reranker to improve accuracy
       | 
       | A giant portion of the job is just asking "What do you want?"
       | over and over again. And also just asking "What do you want to
       | happen when it cannot answer?" Gathering (or building) ground
       | truth data to be able to do Accuracy evaluations.
       | 
       | Also doing a lot of mitigation around the limitations of the
       | tools: adding rate-limiters, resilience4j kind of stuff.
        
         | billy99k wrote:
         | Are you just pushing around prompts? I would think an AI
         | engineer would actually be making changes to the LLM itself.
        
       | csh0 wrote:
       | The "AI Software Engineers" at my company, whose applications and
       | workflows I often support as an SRE, by and large build things
       | with LLMs rather than train or create them.
       | 
       | What they build ranges from product features to internal tools.
       | They make heavy use of LLM vendor inference APIs, vector
       | databases, etc. They end up writing a lot of glue code and
       | software to manage the context of the LLM, query for data,
       | integrate with other systems and so on. They also develop front-
       | end interfaces for their applications.
       | 
       | Only recently have they started to, lightly, explore the idea of
       | training LLMs with managed services like AWS SageMaker.
       | 
       | All this is to say that, the "AI Engineer/SWE" title will
       | probably represent vastly different things depending on the
       | technical sophistication of the organization.
       | 
       | If someone told me they were an AI Engineer at OpenAI I'd be more
       | inclined to expect their role to be more fundamental, elsewhere,
       | not so much.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-07-01 23:02 UTC)