Applied GenAI Engineer

Ship GenAI features users actually love.

Hybrid role mixing software engineering, prompt engineering, and product. Most demanded role of 2025–2026 — every B2B SaaS is hiring one. Best entry point if you're a working SWE.

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Skills profile

What hiring managers actually weigh.

Recommended paths

Take them in order. Each builds on the previous.

Prompt Engineering

Make any LLM do what you actually want.

RAG & Vector Databases

Make models answer from your data, not their guesses.

Deployment & MLOps

Get your model off the laptop and into production.

90-day roadmap

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

1
Prompt + RAG
~4 weeks
- Prompt Engineering path
- Build a real RAG product
2
Production
~4 weeks
- Eval + observability
- Cost & latency budgets
- Cache strategy
3
Portfolio
~3 weeks
- Ship 1 polished GenAI feature
- Write it up
- Pass Applied GenAI cert

Certifications worth taking

Practice & certify on CertQuests after completing the course.

Career outcomes

Realistic next steps after completing the roadmap.

Pivot from SWE in ~3 months
Senior GenAI roles
Founding-engineer at AI startups