u/imlalitsharmaa

I have been working as a full-time software developer for about 2 years now. I'm comfortable with the standard dev lifecycle, backend/frontend engineering, and writing clean production code. However, I want to officially pivot into the AI engineering space and want to start preparing.

Given that I already have the engineering fundamentals down, what does a realistic learning roadmap look like for someone in my position right now?

Specifically, I’m trying to figure out:

• The Math/Theory: How deep into linear algebra, calculus, and statistics do I actually need to go for an AI Engineer role (as opposed to a pure Data Scientist/ML Researcher role)?
• The Tooling: Beyond Python, what are the must-know libraries and frameworks I should focus on building projects with today (e.g., PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain, Ollama)?
• Portfolio Projects: What kind of portfolio projects actually impress hiring managers for AI roles? (I assume basic chatbot wrappers won't cut it anymore).

If anyone here has successfully made this switch after working in traditional software development, I’d love to hear how you structured your transition and what you wish you’d focused on sooner!