90-Day Plan to Land an AI Engineering Job: Benchmark, Learn, Build

Bashiri Smith · Facebook reel · 2026-08-30 · 1:02 · 2,034 views · Open on Facebook

Topics: Start Here: Roadmaps & Strategy, Portfolio Projects, Resume, Job Search & Interviews · Level: beginner

Summary

The creator lays out a 90-day plan for getting an AI engineering job. First, build a small coding project without AI help to find your skill gaps. Then study those gaps every day while taking a DeepLearning.AI course and working with models on Hugging Face. Finally, research the companies you want to work for and build an MVP that solves a real problem one of their teams has, so recruiters notice you.

Key points

• Start with a benchmark coding project. It takes about 1-5 hours, you must build it without AI help, and it does not go on your resume. Its only job is to show your skill gaps.
• Spend 2-4 hours a day fixing the skills the benchmark showed you lack.
• At the same time, take a DeepLearning.AI course (the video doesn't name it) and do at least one lesson every day.
• Keep your hands-on skills sharp by working with models on Hugging Face.
• To build a portfolio project recruiters notice, list 10-50 target companies and look at their job openings.
• Find the most common opening, look up the team posting it, work out what problems that team has, and build an MVP around one of them.
• The creator says the full 15-minute project training and all resource links come free if you comment '15'.

Resources mentioned

• The Complete AI Engineer Roadmap for 2026 (Exact Courses + Step-by-Step) · video · youtube.com · free
  Bashiri Smith's free YouTube training on upgrading your skills and becoming competitive for AI engineering roles, with specific courses listed step by step.
  Also in: SWE-to-AI Engineer Plan for 2027: LLMs, RAG, Agents, Evals, Job Search (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Pointer to Bashiri Smith's Complete AI Engineer Roadmap for 2026 (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Step-by-Step Roadmap to a $200K+ AI Engineering Role (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Software Engineer to AI Engineer Before 2027: A 5-Step Career Plan (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes) and 19 more
• BASWE.Ai Engineer (Skool community) · community · skool.com · paid
  The creator's paid community and program, with an AI learning roadmap (including the full ops and evaluation track), daily calls with engineers and recruiters, resume and portfolio help, and a job-search pipeline.
  Also in: Basic RAG Pipeline in 60 Seconds: From Documents to Grounded Answers (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Pointer to Bashiri Smith's Complete AI Engineer Roadmap for 2026 (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Step-by-Step Roadmap to a $200K+ AI Engineering Role (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), How to Evaluate a RAG Pipeline: Retrieval vs. Generation (Interview Answer) (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes) and 76 more
• DeepLearning.AI · website · deeplearning.ai · free
  The gold-standard ML fundamentals course; you can audit it for free.
  Also in: How to Relearn LLMs & RAG in 2026: A 7-Step Roadmap with Free Resources (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Software Engineer to AI Engineer: Job Boards, Stack, Projects and Learning Sites (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes)
• Hugging Face · website · x.com · free · recommended by both Bashiri Smith & Melvin Vivas
  Platform for hosting and finding ML models, datasets and papers. The quoted post says LocateAnything was trending there.
  Also in: Using an ML agent to train an open-source TTS model on your voice (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), Deploy Open-Source Models with Hugging Face Inference Endpoints (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), Deploying Qwen3.8 27B on Hugging Face Inference Endpoints (Melvin Vivas on X · notes), Using Hugging Face credits: Jobs, Inference Endpoints and Open Models (Melvin Vivas on X · notes) and 38 more
• How to Build a Coding Project That Will Get You Hired in 2026 [FULL BLUEPRINT] · video · youtube.com · free
  Bashiri Smith's full YouTube tutorial on planning and building portfolio projects that solve real problems and show employers you can do useful work.
  Also in: Build Side Projects With Real Users to Stand Out to Employers (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Be the "Glue": Build AI Projects That Solve Real Problems to Get Hired (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Stop Writing AI Keyword Soup: Build Projects That Solve Real Problems (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Beat the Hiring "Trust Recession" With Public Proof-of-Skill Projects (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes) and 2 more

Try this

• Build the benchmark coding project (1-5 hours) without any AI help to find your skill gaps.
• Spend 2-4 hours a day working on the skills you lack.
• Find the DeepLearning.AI course and complete at least one lesson every day.
• Practice by working with models on Hugging Face.
• List 10-50 companies you want to work at and review their job openings.
• Find the most common role, research the team hiring for it, and work out what problems they face.
• Build an MVP that solves one of those team problems.
• Comment '15' to get the creator's free 15-minute project training and resource links.
• A benchmark coding project, built without AI help, to test whether you have the basic AI engineering skills (the video shows it but doesn't name it).
• An MVP that solves a real problem a team at one of your target companies has, based on their job postings.