AI Researcher

Push the frontier — and write papers that survive.

You design experiments, ablate components, and produce reproducible research. Honest scope: most positions require a strong publication record or a research master's/PhD pipeline.

Start the recommended path Compare other roles

Skills profile

What hiring managers actually weigh.

Recommended paths

Take them in order. Each builds on the previous.

AI Engineering Foundations

The shortest path from software engineer to AI engineer.

LLMs & Transformers

See inside the model — without the math wall.

Fine-tuning & Adaptation

When prompting isn't enough.

90-day roadmap

An honest, week-by-week plan. Adjust to your weekly time budget.

1
Theoretical depth
~8 weeks
- Linear algebra, calculus, probability
- Read seminal papers (Attention is All You Need, GPT, RLHF)
2
Reproduce
~6 weeks
- Reproduce one paper end-to-end
- Open-source a clean implementation
3
Contribute
~12 weeks
- Original ablation or extension
- Workshop submission
- Apply to research-engineer roles

Certifications worth taking

Practice & certify on CertQuests after completing the course.

Career outcomes

Realistic next steps after completing the roadmap.

Research engineer at frontier labs
PhD pipeline
Open-source maintainer route