From Frontend to AI Engineer: My Transition Roadmap

After stepping away from my career to care for my little girl, I spent a long time asking myself a difficult question: Do I still belong in tech - and if so, where do I go from here? My days were filled with driving her to therapy sessions, schools, and hospital appointments. While my world revolved around her care, technology - especially AI-kept moving forward at full speed. At times, it felt like the industry I once knew was passing me by. Now that she has started daycare at the church, I finally have the time to pause and redefine my path. I am choosing not to see AI as a threat, but as the direction I want to grow into. The road ahead will not be easy, but I am clear about my goal: to re-enter the workforce, evolve with technology, and build a career that supports my children and reflects who I am today. This is the beginning of that journey.

I want to be:

• Applied AI Engineer
• AI Product Engineer
• AI Software Engineer
• ML Engineer (Product / Inference-focused)

Core expectations:

• Integrate pretrained models (LLMs, vision, speech)
• Build end-to-end AI features
• Understand model behavior, limits, evaluation, and cost
• Deploy, monitor, and iterate in production