6 AI Career Paths for Software Engineers and What Each One Focuses On
Bashiri Smith · Facebook reel · 2026-09-29 · 0:16 · 96,378 views · Open on Facebook
Topics: Resume, Job Search & Interviews, Start Here: Roadmaps & Strategy · Level: beginner
Summary
A short reel listing six AI-related career paths open to software engineers and the main focus of each: AI Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Solutions Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, AI Platform Engineer and AI Security Engineer. It ends by promoting the creator's Skool community (BASWE.Ai Engineer), which offers project, resume and interview help aimed at $100k–$200k+ AI roles.
Key points
- AI Engineer: builds AI applications with LLMs, RAG, agents and evaluation pipelines.
- Forward Deployed Engineer: works directly with customers to build and deploy solutions to their problems.
- AI Solutions Engineer: helps customers pick the right AI solution through discovery, architecture, demos and prototypes.
- Machine Learning Engineer: prepares data, trains models, evaluates performance and deploys models to production.
- AI Platform Engineer: builds the infrastructure that runs AI systems, such as model serving, cloud platforms and monitoring.
- AI Security Engineer: secures AI applications against prompt injection, data exposure and unsafe agent behavior.
- Each path needs a different skill set, so choose one and learn the skills for that path.
Resources mentioned
- 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
- Pick the AI career path (out of the six) that matches your interests.
- Learn the skills for that path, e.g. LLMs, RAG, agents and evals for an AI Engineer role.
- Build projects, improve your resume and prepare for interviews for the role you're targeting.