AI Engineering Skills
Comprehensive skills for building AI applications with Foundation Models.
AI Engineering Stack
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ APPLICATION LAYER │ │ Prompt Engineering, RAG, Agents, Guardrails │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ MODEL LAYER │ │ Model Selection, Finetuning, Evaluation │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER │ │ Inference Optimization, Caching, Orchestration │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
12 Core Skills
Skill Description Guide
Foundation Models Model architecture, sampling, structured outputs foundation-models/
Evaluation Methodology Metrics, AI-as-judge, comparative evaluation evaluation-methodology/
AI System Evaluation End-to-end evaluation, benchmarks, model selection ai-system-evaluation/
Prompt Engineering System prompts, few-shot, chain-of-thought, defense prompt-engineering/
RAG Systems Chunking, embedding, retrieval, reranking rag-systems/
AI Agents Tool use, planning strategies, memory systems ai-agents/
Finetuning LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, model merging finetuning/
Dataset Engineering Data quality, curation, synthesis, annotation dataset-engineering/
Inference Optimization Quantization, batching, caching, speculative decoding inference-optimization/
AI Architecture Gateway, routing, observability, deployment ai-architecture/
Guardrails & Safety Input/output guards, PII protection, injection defense guardrails-safety/
User Feedback Explicit/implicit signals, feedback loops, A/B testing user-feedback/
Development Process
- Use Case Evaluation → 2. Model Selection → 3. Evaluation Pipeline ↓
- Prompt Engineering → 5. Context (RAG/Agents) → 6. Finetuning (if needed) ↓
- Inference Optimization → 8. Deployment → 9. Monitoring & Feedback
Quick Decision Guide
Need Start With
Improve output quality prompt-engineering
Add external knowledge rag-systems
Multi-step reasoning ai-agents
Reduce latency/cost inference-optimization
Measure quality evaluation-methodology
Protect system guardrails-safety
Reference
Based on "AI Engineering" by Chip Huyen (O'Reilly, 2025).