Artificial Intelligence Engineer: Education, Roles, and Skills 2022

Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineers are the most sought-after career. This is because AI has an endless ability to boost and simplify tasks generally performed by humans, such as speech recognition, business process management, disease detection, and image processing.

In AI, machines learn from previous actions and data, which are negative or positive. With the new data, the device can rectify itself, so the issues don't resurface and create relevant adjustments to tackle new inputs. Moreover, the machine also performs human-like activities.

If you are technically prone and have a software programming background, you may want to consider a productive AI career and know how to become an AI engineer.

How to be an AI Expert?

To become a proficient in AI, you'll require the following steps:

1. Obtain a secondary school diploma
2. Complete a Bachelor's degree and to enhance competitiveness for AI engineering careers, go for a Master's degree
3. Participate in AI courses or diploma programs and earn accreditations
4. Search for employment after obtain a sufficient amount of expertise.

Roles of AI Engineers

An AI engineer creates AI models leveraging Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and Deep Learning (DL) neural networks to derive meaningful insights, which helps in making crucial decisions that impact the whole organization. These professionals also build weak or strong AIs based on what objectives they want to accomplish.

AI engineers strongly understand programming, data science, and software engineering. They leverage various tools and practices to process data and maintain AI systems.

Responsibilities of AI Engineers

As an AI engineer, you need to accomplish specific tasks: develop, test, and deploy AI models via programming algorithms (Linear Regression, Random Forest, etc.)

Let's see some of the significant responsibilities of AI engineers.

• Develop data ingestion and transformation system
• Be a good game-changer, as coordinating with employees is a must.
• Convert the ML models into Application Program Interfaces (APIs), so other software can leverage them.
• Conduct statistical analysis and enhance the outcomes so the companies can make better decisions
• Create AI models from scratch and assist various organizational components like stakeholders and product managers to understand what results they receive from the model
• Set up and manage AI product and development system
• Automate the system that the data science team leverages

Skills Required for AI Engineers

Professionals who are keen on becoming an AI engineer must know the following prerequisite skills.

Technical Skills

1. Spark and Big Data technologies (Apache Spark, MongoDB, Hadoop, Cassandra)
2. Programming skills (Python, Java, C++, and R)
3. ML and DL algorithms (KNN, SVM, Linear Regression, recurrent neural network, convolutional neural network, generative adversarial network) and Frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Caffe, and Theano)
4. Linear algebra, probability, and statistics

Soft Skills

The difference between successful engineers and those with a hard time is rooted in their soft skills. Though being an AI professional is primarily a technical job, the potential to seamlessly communicate with others, deal with issues, organize an individual's time efficiently, and work in partnership with others are the crucial factors that determine whether or not a project is successfully executed and delivered.

1. Problem-solving
2. Teamwork
3. Critical thinking
4. Communication skills
5. Domain expertise
6. Business Intelligence (BI)
7. Time management

AI Engineer Salary

According to Glassdoor, an AI engineer's average salary per year is $114,121 in the US and INR765,353 in India. But, of course, the salary may differ in several companies, and with the expertise and knowledge you bring to the table.

AI Engineer Job Roles

Since various sectors across the globe leverage AI to some point, including education and healthcare, there has been significant growth in the career choices within the AI field.

Some of these job roles are:

• Data scientists
• AI developer
• ML Engineer
• BI developer
• AI architect