[scottydelta]

AI engineer is more of a combination of data engineer and MLE. An AI engineer would help productionize an algorithm or AI model developed by the researchers which would include deploying at scale to compute, providing access to trained models, and ability to update and serve the models.

Basically researchers develops on his laptop, AI engineer helps deliver it to customer's laptop.

[mattbrewsbytes]

Here's a web app engineer perspective: delivery to the customer's laptop is likely over HTTP so the mechanism is taking customer text input, calling API's and delivering results.

In its simplest form (again from a web app engineer's viewpoint) LLMs ingest text, organize that data (a very complicated process I don't understand fully, nor need to), and provide API's to output text given some set of inputs so this resembles very closely working on Elastic or other search engine technology. A caveat is the API's being called likely maintain state in the sense of keeping track of inputs, context and outputs. I would classify someone that is working on this as more of an API/backend engineer. They need to understand the AI/LLM data model being used which is very specific and the use cases around it but they did not engineer the AI/LLM data model themselves, it was likely some other R&D engineers.

Edit to add: AI engineer to me is the R&D people I reference above - the ones building the data model that others use.