From data scientist to AI engineer: a 9-step 2026 shipping roadmap
mdancho84 · x · 2026-10-20
Data scientist mdancho84's advice: stop learning more ML algorithms and start learning to SHIP AI. His 9-step roadmap from data scientist to AI engineer in 2026:
- Software engineering: APIs, Git, testing, SQL, async Python, Docker — a notebook isn't a product
- LLM apps: Claude/OpenAI APIs, prompting, structured outputs, tool calling
- RAG: chunking, embeddings, vector DBs, hybrid search, reranking, retrieval evaluation
- AI agents: tools, state, memory, retries, permissions, human approval — one reliable agent first
- AI evaluation: test sets, hallucinations, task success, latency, cost, traces
6–9 (full version in the chart): deployment (FastAPI/Docker/cloud), production engineering (CI/CD, monitoring), optimization (caching, batching, model routing), and a portfolio of real shipped products
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