Andrew Ng Defines Core Competencies for AI Engineering Roles
August 23, 2026
The AI Engineering Skills Map identifies six pillars for production-grade development: LLM foundations, data grounding, agentic systems, evaluation-driven development, production operations, and ML foundations. This framework emphasizes that iterative, evaluation-led development is necessary to manage the inherent unpredictability of LLM outputs.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
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builderYou should prioritize mastering evaluation-driven development and data grounding to move beyond simple prompting.
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founderUse these skill pillars to structure your engineering hiring and training roadmaps.