# What Practical Skills Do AI Engineers Need?

DevFeed: [What Practical Skills Do AI Engineers Need?](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/i-designed-an-ai-engineer-interview-most-developers-failed-32367.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://brianjenney.substack.com/p/i-designed-an-ai-engineer-interview>)

Author: Brian Jenney

Published: 2026-03-14T15:44:42Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Brian Jenney](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/brian-jenney.md>)

Topics: [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [Building AI Systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/building-ai-systems.md>), [Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/retrieval-augmented-generation-rag.md>), [Full-Stack](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/full-stack.md>), [Web app](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/webapp.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-engineer](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-engineer.md>), [building-ai-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/building-ai-systems.md>), [full-stack](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/full-stack.md>), [rag](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rag.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>)

## AI overview

The author reflects on designing interviews for an AI engineering replacement role and argues that the job is mainly about integrating AI into practical software. The article emphasizes full-stack development, agents, workflows, RAG pipelines, vector databases, and evaluation systems rather than model training or research.

## Source excerpt

Last year I quit an AI startup.