Breaking Into AI: The Complete Roadmap to Becoming an AI Engineer from Scratch: LLMs, Agents, RAG, and a 90-Day Action Plan for Software and Data Engineers

The AI engineering job market is exploding, and if you're a software or data engineer, you're closer to it than you think.You don't need a PhD. You don't need to start over. You need a bridge from the engineering skills you already have to the skills the AI job market is hiring for right now, and that bridge is exactly what this book builds.Written by a Data and AI engineering leader who made the transition himself, from enterprise Java to big data to leading teams that build AI, Breaking Into AI is the practical, no-hype roadmap for working engineers:- The landscape, decoded: AI Engineer vs. ML Engineer vs. Data Scientist, what each role actually does, and where you fit- Just enough math, taught through code, not proofs- ML and deep learning foundations, including the transformer architecture behind every modern LLM- The 2026 skill set: prompt engineering, context engineering, LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, fine-tuning, and AI agents with tool use, guardrails, and cost controls- One system built end to end: follow FlickSage, a movie recommendation platform, as it evolves from a NumPy similarity engine into a deployed, monitored, multi-tool AI agent- Production reality: deployment, monitoring, evaluation-driven development, and the failure modes that kill AI projects after the demo- Landing the job: a three-project portfolio strategy, frameworks for ML and agent system design interviews, negotiation guidance, and a week-by-week 90-day action planEvery chapter includes working code, hands-on exercises, and checkpoint summaries. Every concept is in service of one goal: making you a hireable, effective AI engineer.The window for this career transition is open right now. This book is the map. Read more