Here’s a structured Learning Pathway to Become an AI Engineer, broken down into Stages with
Core Skills, Topics, and Recommended Tools or Courses. This roadmap assumes no prior AI
experience, but basic math and programming knowledge is helpful.
🎯 Stage 1: Foundations (1–2 months)
Goal: Build strong fundamentals in programming, math, and understanding how AI works.
✅ Core Skills:
• Python programming
• Linear algebra, probability, and calculus
• Data structures and algorithms
• Basics of AI and ML
🧠 Topics:
• Python (Numpy, Pandas, OOP)
• Math for ML (matrix operations, derivatives, probability)
• Git and GitHub
• Time complexity, sorting/searching algorithms
Tools / Resources:
• CS50x by Harvard
• Python for Everybody – Coursera
• Khan Academy – Linear Algebra, Probability
• [Link] – Prerequisites
🚀 Stage 2: Core Machine Learning (2–3 months)
Goal: Understand supervised, unsupervised learning and practice ML algorithms.
✅ Core Skills:
• Training/testing models
• Evaluating models
• Data preprocessing
🧠 Topics:
• Regression, classification, clustering
• Model performance metrics (accuracy, precision, recall)
• Overfitting, underfitting, cross-validation
Tools / Resources:
• Andrew Ng’s ML Course (Coursera)
• scikit-learn documentation
• Kaggle: Titanic, Housing, Iris datasets
🤖 Stage 3: Deep Learning (2–3 months)
Goal: Dive into neural networks, computer vision, and NLP.
✅ Core Skills:
• Building and training deep learning models
• Tuning hyperparameters
• Transfer learning
🧠 Topics:
• Neural Networks, CNNs, RNNs
• Embeddings and transformers
• Loss functions (MSE, Cross-Entropy)
Tools / Resources:
• Deep Learning Specialization – Coursera
• [Link] Practical DL
• TensorFlow or PyTorch
🧠 Stage 4: Advanced AI Topics (3–4 months)
Goal: Explore AI specializations and build advanced applications.
✅ Core Skills:
• Specialized architectures
• Training custom models
• Using pre-trained models
🧠 Topics:
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Generative AI (GANs, Diffusion Models)
• Reinforcement Learning (RL)
• Explainability (SHAP, LIME)
Tools / Resources:
• Hugging Face Transformers
• OpenAI Gym
• Papers with Code: [Link]
Stage 5: Real-World Projects & Deployment (2–3 months)
Goal: Gain experience building, deploying, and maintaining AI systems.
✅ Core Skills:
• Model serving and deployment
• APIs and back-end integration
• MLOps basics
🧠 Topics:
• Flask/FastAPI for APIs
• Streamlit for AI apps
• Docker, CI/CD for deployment
• Model monitoring
Tools / Resources:
• Full Stack Deep Learning
• Deploy ML with FastAPI & Docker – YouTube/Tutorials
• Streamlit, Gradio
🧳 Stage 6: Specialize or Go Pro (Ongoing)
Goal: Focus on a domain (e.g., GenAI, CV, NLP, RL) and build a portfolio.
🔍 Choose One or More Paths:
• Computer Vision: Object detection, segmentation (YOLO, OpenCV)
• NLP: Chatbots, summarization, LLMs (LLama, GPT)
• Reinforcement Learning: Robotics, gaming AI
• MLOps & Scaling: Model pipelines, monitoring
• Generative AI: Text-to-image (Stable Diffusion, DALL·E), audio, video
📁 Portfolio & Career Prep
• Build 3–5 solid projects on GitHub
• Write blog posts (e.g., Medium, Hashnode)
• Compete in Kaggle, AI hackathons
• Learn system design for ML systems
• Prepare for interviews (Leetcode, system design, case studies)
🧭 Bonus: Learning Tools & Communities
• Books: “Deep Learning” by Goodfellow, “Hands-On ML with Scikit-Learn & TF” by
Aurélien Géron
• Communities: Kaggle, Reddit r/MachineLearning, Discord (DataTalks, AI Coffeehouse)
• News: Arxiv-sanity, Towards Data Science, Papers with Code
