Career guide · Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Career guide: AI engineer roles in 2026

ML engineer, applied scientist, AI engineer, agent engineer: the titles overlap. This guide separates them by what you build and what interviews test.

11 min readPublished
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What the guide covers

We group roles by the artefact you own: a model, a pipeline, a product feature, or an agent system. Each group has different interviews and different portfolio expectations.

Coding-agent fluency is now assumed in most loops. We cover how to demonstrate it without letting it hide gaps in your own understanding.

Ends with a checklist for a portfolio that covers all four artefact types with one project each.