AI Engineer Roadmap: 5 Skill Areas, a 24-Week Study Order & Interview Strategy

Bashiri Smith · Facebook reel · 2026-09-18 · 2:29 · 5,203 views · Open on Facebook

Topics: Start Here: Roadmaps & Strategy, Resume, Job Search & Interviews, AI System Design & Architecture · Level: beginner

Summary

Bashiri Smith answers three questions people ask about becoming an AI engineer: what to study, in what order and for how long, and how to get and pass interviews. The plan rests on a GitHub repo of 4,894 real AI engineering job descriptions. It splits the skills into five areas and orders them practical-first over about 24 weeks. For the job search he says to apply to warm and cold leads instead of using easy apply, and to practise system design out loud.

Key points

• The 5 skill areas, taken from 4,894 real AI engineering job descriptions: (1) LLMs & RAG, (2) integration, agents & orchestration, (3) ops & evaluation, (4) safety & ethics, (5) ML foundations.
• About 70% of AI engineering roles are mostly LLMs and RAG. The other 30% also ask for one of the other four areas, and adding those on top of RAG puts you ahead of most applicants.
• Study order and time: LLMs & RAG (5 weeks) → integration/agents/orchestration (6 weeks) → ops & evaluation (6 weeks) → safety & ethics (2 weeks) → ML foundations (5 weeks), about 24 weeks in total.
• Learn the practical skills first and the model/ML theory second.
• Ops and evaluation skills set you apart from 'fake AI engineers'. Safety and ethics is mostly conceptual: companies want to know you can build safe AI apps.
• Job search loop: apply, track, convert. Don't spam easy apply. Tailor your resume for each role.
• Split applications into warm leads (LinkedIn connections and friends at the company: nurture them and ask for a referral in a non-weird way) and cold leads (find a contact's name on LinkedIn, then look up their email with hunter.io).
• Passing AI engineering interviews is mostly about system design, so practise it out loud with a real person.

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
• Bashiri Smith's free AI engineering interview resources guide · pdf · free
  A free guide in which the creator lists his favourite resources for AI engineering interviews.
  DM only: comment solved on this reel on Facebook and you get it by DM.
• AI Engineering Field Guide (Alexey Grigorev) · repo · github.com · free
  A GitHub repo that collects and analyses 4,894 real AI engineering job descriptions. The video uses it to define the five skill areas.
• Hunter.io · tool · hunter.io · free
  An email-finding tool: domain search shows a company's email pattern, the email finder returns a person's likely address with a confidence score, and it can verify addresses before you send.
• LinkedIn · website · linkedin.com · free
  Professional network, used here to find warm-lead connections and the names of contacts for cold outreach.
  Also in: Step-by-Step Roadmap to a $200K+ AI Engineering Role (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), 7 Habits to Become an AI Engineer: Books, Tooling, Research & Shipping (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), 6 Steps to Build a Resume Project That Lands an AI Engineering Job (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), 6-Step Framework for Building AI Projects Target Companies Care About (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes) and 3 more

Try this

• Study the five areas in order: LLMs & RAG (5 wk), integration/agents/orchestration (6 wk), ops & evaluation (6 wk), safety & ethics (2 wk), ML foundations (5 wk).
• Learn the practical building skills before the ML theory.
• Stop spamming easy apply. Tailor your resume for each application and track your applications.
• Split target companies into warm leads and cold leads.
• For warm leads, nurture your connections and ask for a referral in a natural way.
• For cold leads, find a contact on LinkedIn and get their email with hunter.io.
• Practise system design interviews out loud with a real person.
• Watch the full roadmap video and comment 'solved' to get the free interview guide and the community link.