Next Steps for Staff+ AI Engineering

Here’s a recap of Staff+ AI skills and how to take the next step:

1. Prompt contracts: Write prompts as contracts, with a definition of done, precedence rules, and private reasoning.

Next step: Learn schema-driven prompting and evaluation frameworks to automate CI compliance checks.

2. RAG: Ground answers with retrieval to reduce hallucinations, starting with llm.txt briefing files.

Next step: Build a full RAG pipeline with chunking, hybrid search, re-ranking, citations, and freshness monitoring.

3. Model ecosystems: Delegate like you would to a team; apply reasoning models for planning, mid-tier for execution, and IDE agents for incremental work.

Next step: Design a routing strategy that caps latency and cost, and logs which model did what.

4. Agent orchestration: Replace “mega-agents” with orchestrator–worker systems that are composable, observable, and safe.

Next step: Explore agentic design patterns that keep autonomy predictable and limit blast radius.

Where to learn more

You can get hands-on with building these essential skills in our most popular AI courses:

• All You Need to Know About Prompt Engineering for mastering prompting techniques (and knowing when to use each one).

• Fundamentals of Retrieval-Augmented Generation with LangChain to start building your RAG pipeline with the in-demand tool, LangChain.

• Agentic System Design to understand the unique needs of agentic systems through real-world case studies from hyperscalers like NVIDIA.

• Master Agentic Design Patterns to get hands-on experience with AI design patterns like orchestrator-worker, prompt chaining, routing, parallelization, and more.