Q: Do I need to learn machine learning or deep learning first?

No. This is the single most expensive misconception in the field.

You do not need to build or train models to be an AI Engineer. The models already exist. They run on the servers of frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and you access them through API calls. Your work is everything around the model: context, prompting, retrieval, tools, evals, deployment. That's an engineering skillset, not a research skillset.

To be clear, you're not inventing the brain. You're engineering everything around it. There is an empirical corner to the work (evals involve experimentation), but you can skip years of ML theory, linear algebra refreshers, and Kaggle competitions entirely.

If you're already a software engineer, you're closer than you think. AI engineering is roughly 70% engineering. You have spent years building the hard part.