Book companion

Build · Ship · Prove

The AI Engineer Roadmap

Choose the work you want to do, turn skills into three inspectable projects, and decide where cloud or certification belongs after you have built the evidence.

Paths
3
Portfolio projects
3
Planning horizon
12 weeks
The AI Engineer Roadmap book cover: Build, Ship, Prove

The operating idea

A roadmap is an ordered set of constraints, not a list of everything worth learning.

All three paths share Python, Git, data literacy, APIs, evaluation, security, and documentation. Your primary path determines which evidence you build first and what you deliberately postpone.

Three primary paths

Choose the work before the credential.

Path A

AI / ML Engineer with PyTorch

Choose this path when you want to train, adapt, evaluate, or optimize models and enjoy investigating why results change.

  • Python and ML evaluation
  • PyTorch workflows
  • Controlled experiments
  • Reproducible model artifacts
Proof to build

A complete experiment with a baseline, held-out evaluation, error analysis, and reproducibility record.

Review this path’s current milestones
Path B

Cloud AI Application Engineer

Choose this path when you want to build useful software around model capabilities and care about users, interfaces, evaluation, and delivery.

  • Application contracts
  • Retrieval and structured outputs
  • Evaluation and security
  • One cloud ecosystem
Proof to build

An evaluated AI application with documented boundaries, failure behavior, authorization, latency, and cost observations.

Review this path’s current milestones
Path C

Production AI / MLOps Engineer

Choose this path when your strongest interest is making AI workflows reliable, repeatable, deployable, observable, and recoverable.

  • Linux and containers
  • Deployment and rollback
  • Observability
  • Lifecycle and release records
Proof to build

A bounded service another engineer can build, run, inspect, recover, and evaluate without relying on your memory.

Review this path’s current milestones

Portfolio sequence

Build three kinds of evidence.

Each project adds a different engineering responsibility. The templates keep decisions, evaluation, failures, and limitations visible.

Open project templates
  1. 01
    From Data to Model

    Turn a defined decision into a measurable prediction problem, establish a baseline, evaluate honestly, and explain what the evidence does not establish.

  2. 02
    Build a Modern AI Application

    Build an application with a user problem, information boundary, evaluation set, error policy, and an explicit response when the model is uncertain.

  3. 03
    Build With Production Constraints

    Make deployment, observability, reproducibility, security, and failure recovery explicit enough for another engineer to reason about the service.

Reader resources

Continue from the QR code without losing the book’s context.

These tools are optional. They help you save a decision, work with a template, or verify information that may change after publication.