From Software Engineer to AI FDE Already a software engineer and want to move into AI Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)? You don’t need to start from zero. You need to add the skills that turn your software engineering knowledge into production AI systems for real customers. Here’s the 8-week roadmap: Weeks 1–2: Enterprise Integration Learn REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth, SQL, background jobs, retries, Docker, and cloud deployment. Weeks 3–4: Applied AI Engineering Master model APIs, structured outputs, tool calling, context design, embeddings, hybrid search, RAG, and workflow orchestration. Weeks 5–6: Reliability Build 50+ test cases and measure accuracy, retrieval quality, groundedness, tool-call success, latency, and cost. Add tracing, access controls, and prompt-injection tests. Weeks 7–8: Customer + Solutions Skills Learn customer discovery, solution design, architecture diagrams, implementation planning, demos, rollouts, and adoption. Then package everything into one strong ...