The Rise of the AI Ops Engineer: The Future of Tech Jobs

I thought I’d write a blog on these new types of AI Engineers that are emerging now, or at least the ones they are talking about in the press on a daily basis.

We, of course, have the traditional ML Engineers, but this is a bit different and quite interesting. What exactly is this new type of AI Engineers? They are specialized in applying and productizing AI. They must use various models like the emerging open-source models, such as GPT-4. They have to stay updated with the latest from AI research because this sector moves very fast. They intersect traditional software engineering, machine learning, and AI research to create impactful products.

You don’t need a PhD for this because practical engineering skills often outshine academic credentials when implementing and shipping AI products in real-world settings.

The new engineering type here tries to use all paradigms of programming. They use classical software, machine learning models, and the new 3.0, the LLM prompting part. This is like the transformative software 3.0 era they talk about, and these AI Engineers will be at the forefront of the AI Revolution. Their role will look increasingly vital due to the exponential growth of AI and the shift in applied AI.

Let’s look at what skills you need for this AI engineer role. You need AI model expertise, tool mastery, and awareness because you have to keep up with the pace, AI productization, coding fluency, an agile approach, innovative problem-solving, and a paradigm balance that combines human-written code, machine learning models, and prompted code.

With all these skills, I wanted to find a job posting that tries to embed all of these skills into a job. I found one from Greylock. The headline of the job posting is “Prompt Engineer LLM” for Greylock based in San Francisco. It was posted on June 9th. It shows early investment, looking for expanding a team.

“Our ideal candidate has hands-on experience in prompt engineering and fine-tuning LLMs for applications. We have some qualifications: CS/AI qualification, two years of experience with transformer-based architectures, expertise in Python, experience working with Lang chain, Llama index, familiarity with Laura or reinforcement learning with human feedback, ChatGPT, AutoGPT, Open Assistant, Google Bark.”

So, you can see from this that it’s the same thing we’ve discussed in this AI engineer kind of role we are expecting or that could be emerging. Already there are similar job opportunities out there. I thought this was interesting; this skill set transfers into the real world.

So, what kind of tasks does an AI engineer of this type perform? Model evaluation, tool mastery, constant learning, innovative applications, value discovery, bridging the gap, and many more.

As Bloomberg reports, some companies offer salaries of up to a sizzling $335,000 per annum for so-called “prompt engineer” positions. In essence, these are supposed to be ChatGPT wizards who are so good at the tech that they can train other people to use it more effectively.