15 Production-Grade AI Projects to Go from Software Engineer to AI Engineer

Bashiri Smith · Facebook reel · 2026-09-16 · 0:07 · 51,333 views · Open on Facebook

Topics: Portfolio Projects, LLMOps, Deployment & Monitoring, Evaluation (Evals) & Testing · Level: intermediate

Summary

A short reel listing 15 portfolio projects for software engineers moving into AI engineering. The creator says none of them are "I called an API and deployed a chatbot"; each one solves a real problem AI teams face in production. The projects cover evals and regression detection, cost control and gateways, RAG and caching, guardrails, fine-tuning with LoRA, and agent orchestration. The video has no speech; all content is in the caption.

Key points

• Skip simple 'call an API and deploy a chatbot' projects. Build things that solve real production problems for AI teams.
• Reliability and evals projects: a model regression detection system, a failure forensics tool for AI pipelines, an LLM output arbitration system and an automated eval dataset generator.
• Cost and infrastructure projects: an LLM cost autopilot, a semantic caching layer, an LLM gateway with rate limiting and fallback routing, and an AI feature flag system.
• Retrieval and data projects: a RAG pipeline with hybrid search, Text-to-SQL with guardrails and a multi-modal document processor.
• Prompt and model lifecycle projects: a prompt versioning and A/B testing platform, and a fine-tuning pipeline using LoRA.
• Automation and agent projects: a self-healing documentation bot and an agent orchestration system.
• Commenting 'hired' gets you the creator's step-by-step build guide for all 15 projects and a link to a community with working engineers and recruiters.

Resources mentioned

• Bashiri Smith's AI Projects Guide · pdf · drive.google.com · free
  The creator's guide to 27 AI projects, with full architecture, build steps phase by phase, interview talking points, and the stack for each project.
  Also in: 6-Step Framework for Building AI Projects Target Companies Care About (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), Generate Job-Worthy AI Project Ideas from Recent Research Papers + ChatGPT (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), 3 AI Portfolio Projects That Get Past the 6-Second Resume Scan (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes), 5 Weekend AI Engineering Projects: Cost Routing, Caching, Evals & Observability (Bashiri Smith on Facebook · notes) and 3 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

Try this

• Choose projects from the 15-item list and build them as production-grade portfolio pieces, not basic chatbots.
• Comment 'hired' on the post to get the step-by-step build guide and the community link.
• Model regression detection system
• LLM cost autopilot
• Failure forensics tool for AI pipelines
• Self-healing documentation bot
• LLM output arbitration system
• RAG pipeline with hybrid search
• Semantic caching layer
• Text-to-SQL with guardrails
• Prompt versioning + A/B testing platform
• Fine-tuning pipeline with LoRA
• LLM gateway with rate limiting + fallback routing
• AI feature flag system
• Automated eval dataset generator
• Multi-modal document processor
• Agent orchestration system