How To Become An AI Engineer? | Job Description & Salary

Looking for steps on how to become an AI engineer? You’re in the right spot (and timeline). We are living in the age of Industrial Revolution 4.0, where everything we see is getting digitized. There is no alternative but process automation to get things done in this era. 

The digital expansion progress requires strong back-end development with algorithms. These algorithms are supervised and processed with lesser human involvement to build a model of high performance. The systems intend to be self-learning and coping.

This complex process of designing, developing, and deploying artificial intelligence systems is the key role of an Artificial Intelligence Engineer.

This guide will not only provide you with a guide on how to become AI engineer in India but also will help you understand the artificial intelligence engineer salary, responsibilities, skills, and scope of the field.

What is AI Engineering?

Machine Intelligence is the ability of the machine to learn from the past data and inputs provided. AI systems mimic the cognitive abilities of humans to undergo problem-solving and enable decision-making.

AI is composed of computational programs that follow intelligent behavior. The intelligence is assimilated into various application domains where it minimizes the human efforts to be a part of the problem-solving approaches.

A successfully implemented AI system adds value to the business by being an automatic self-learning helper. AI is an edge-building technology that redefines its own boundaries.

The growth of AI is evident from the progressions of its scope, performance, and potential. AI’s algorithmic advancement and processing performance revolves around the ever-improving execution of jobs to which Artificial Intelligence is applied.

AI+Engineering

AI engineering is an evolving AI professional role focusing on developing artificial intelligence systems, tools, and business processes. An AI engineer answers questions like: How can AI achieve business outcomes? What are the boundaries of an AI-implemented system in real-time projects? Does the AI system bind to ethical standards?

The amplified real-world applications generate massive datasets, which are to be handled by experts. These experts use conventional machine learning techniques like neural networks, NLP, and deep learning tools to work on complex datasets.

The AI engineers skill themselves in data science, software development, data engineering, and machine learning to design, build and deploy robust and scalable AI applications.

Roles and Responsibilities of an AI Engineer

Due to the complex nature of this role, many aspirants believe the AI engineer job description to be very complicated. However, it is far from complicated. 

First, you need to understand an AI engineer’s roles and responsibilities. 

AI Engineer is an IT expert who aims to build intelligent algorithms proficient to learn, explore, predict future business events, and understand the requirements for artificial intelligence. Creating supervised machines skilled like the human brain raises their demand across industries. Also, an AI engineer should also be comfortable with the prerequisite for AI. The clear and comprehensive job responsibilities of an AI engineer are mentioned below.

How to Become AI Engineer in India?

The AI engineer job description demands highly skilled AI professionals. This expertise is not an immediate transition; rather, it’s a gradual process requiring constant efforts. To open up to career prospects, businesses expect aspiring professionals to have the required educational, technical, and soft skills. The AI engineer skills include various machine learning and AI tools, big data technologies, Neuro-linguistic programming, deep learning, and model development.

You can start by earning a mathematics, statistics, or computer science degree. Having a degree in one of these subjects would help you build a strong foundation. It will familiarize you with the fundamental concepts of mathematics and data modeling, which will help you a lot as you’ll learn more advanced concepts about AI.

Education  

• Have a bachelor’s degree from a deemed university: As soon as you get your secondary school certificate, enroll in an undergraduate B.SC. or B.Tech. course in fields like computer science, information technology, statistics, applied mathematics, or equivalent. Within the duration of 3-4 years, you will attain theoretical and basic knowledge about the field.

• Learn the essentials: Apart from the theoretical concepts, you must learn the fundamentals of domains like mathematics, probability, programming languages, database operations, statistics, and analytics. This will help in developing a knowledge base for advanced technical skills. You can use various online sources, books, and lectures to understand the concepts.
• Earn certifications: AI is a wide platform with various tools, software, and algorithms for dedicated business requirements.
• Gain experience: You must work on real-time projects to exploit your capabilities to be a successful AI developer. Seek an entry-level job whose job description fits AI engineer skills. Work on the tools, frameworks, and algorithms to get knowledge of real-time projects. Switch to senior job roles as you gain experience.

Skills required to become an AI engineer

• Programming essentials: AI developers must have a strong grip over programming languages. R, Java, Python, and C++ are the most used languages for AI model implementations.
• Frameworks and Algorithms: An AI engineer’s role is to deal with the data and develop algorithms to handle the model infrastructure. For better understanding, it is beneficial to know about machine learning algorithms like Naïve Bayes, linear regression, random forest, Support vector machines, and KNN. In addition, Deep learning algorithms like convolution neural networks, artificial neural networks, and recurrent neural networks can be used to handle unstructured data. AI-based models rely on various frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, and Theano to build AI solutions for challenging problems.  
• Math and statistics: Analytics is incomplete without numbers. To develop and test AI algorithms and models, an AI engineer must be familiar with linear algebra, probability distribution functions, statistics, and calculus.

Technical skills 

• Machine learning: An artificial intelligence engineer must specialize in supervised and unsupervised ML techniques and their implementation, which is an important prerequisite for AI. Concepts like logistic regression, clustering, classification, and decision trees should be clear.
• Cloud platforms and Model deployment: A successfully implemented AI application must be deployed at a scalable level. An AI developer must learn to use popular cloud platforms like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure for this AI model deployment.  
• Software development models: The model development needs an understanding of the software development lifecycle. An AI software engineer should be able to define, design, develop and test the models for the AI solutions.
• Data science and big data technologies: Working on technologies like Spark and Big Data, such as Hadoop and MongoDB is necessary to infer significant insights from hefty volumes of data.

Soft skills

• Critical thinking ability: Analysis of massive datasets require keen observations and critical thinking skills. One should observe and identify the business possibilities from the data. Scrutiny of the data is necessary for designing business-centric high-performance AI models. 
• Communication and teamwork: The AI developer job description includes close coordination with the cross-functional team to ensure an easy interface for a complex process. Thus, it is necessary for an AI to have smooth communication and collaboration with the designing and data engineering teams. This will help in understanding the data handling and product infrastructure in a better way. 
• Domain knowledge and business Intelligence: Profits are guaranteed if the AI processes implemented are business oriented. Along with the technical and soft skills, you must know about current trends, customer segments, target audiences, and strategies about the business for which the AI pieces need to be built. 

AI Engineer Salary in India

Wondering about the return on investment for your education as an AI engineer? Here’s your answer to the question: what would be an artificial intelligence engineer salary per month?

Depending upon the experience, the AI Engineer Salary in India starts from INR 40,000 to INR 138,000. Companies like HyperVerge, Razorthink, TCS, Google, etc. provide alluring six-digit salaries for the role of AI Engineer. 

Source: AmbitionBox

AI Engineering Roles 

You can pursue many other roles in this field besides becoming an AI engineer. Here are some of the prominent ones amongst them:

Business intelligence Developer

A business intelligence developer, also known as a BI developer, is responsible for working with databases in an organization. He/she has to create BI tools and reports such as dimensional analyses and physical data models. The primary responsibility of this role is to develop and enhance IT implementations within the organization. BI developers are responsible for designing, coding, testing, and aggregating SQL queries to offer the necessary information to their users.

• Average Salary 

The average pay in this field is INR 6.4 lakh per annum. A BI developer’s salary starts from INR 3.4 lakh per annum and goes up to INR 15.2 lakh per annum. (Source)

AI Architect

AI architects are responsible for creating and managing the architecture of their organization by using AI technology frameworks. They have to understand the requirements of their organization and create solutions that match the same. This means they have to plan the implementation of the solutions, select the correct technologies and evaluate the effectiveness of their organization’s architecture. AI architects must be familiar with various tools and technologies used in the AI industry.

• Average Salary 

The average salary of an AI architect in India is INR 30.2 lakh per annum. It’s comparatively more than an average AI engineer salary as AI architects are the glue between all the scientists, business, and operations. (Source)

Data Scientist

Data Scientists help their organizations find valuable insights from large amounts of data to make better-informed decisions. They perform data mining to collect and analyze the necessary data by implementing the appropriate machine learning algorithms.

Data scientists help their organizations identify hidden patterns in the data they wouldn’t have found otherwise. They are experts in big data, mathematics, and analytics. They share their insights with other organization members through visualizations and reports. 

• Average Salary

The average salary of a data scientist in India is INR 10 LPA. The pay ranges from INR 4 LPA and goes up to INR 23.2 LPA depending on the experience and skills. (Source)

You may also to like read: Know about Artificial Intelligence Career Paths | Job Roles & Skills

Domains for AI Engineering Professionals

Is AI engineering in demand?

Yes. There’s a high demand for AI engineering professionals in various industries. The most prominent employers for this role include Google, Facebook, Netflix, Fractal Analytics, Amazon, American Express, NVIDIA, Intel, etc.

AI-based solutions help companies automate tedious processes within their organization. A company can easily enhance its efficiency and productivity by using such solutions. Such an advantage can benefit any organization, regardless of its industry. Hence, you’ll find AI engineers working in various sectors, including the following:

Healthcare

AI has many applications in the healthcare industry. Hospitals and large medical institutions use AI-based solutions to automate various processes of their organization, such as inventory management. Such automation allows them to enhance the efficiency of their operations. AI also helps in reducing the research time for vaccines. Researchers have also used AI for COVID-19 drug discovery, which led to the fastest vaccine development in history. (Source)

Finance

Financial enterprises and organizations have adopted AI technologies to assess and mitigate risks. Banks and insurance companies use AI and ML algorithms to detect fraud to prevent the same. Another popular application of AI technology in the finance sector is analyzing investments. They use AI-based solutions to predict the future behavior of investments so they can make decisions accordingly.

Entertainment

OTT platforms use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze the viewing patterns of their users. Then, they use their findings to recommend more personalized content that matches their customers’ preferences. Netflix also uses AI and ML to optimize the streaming quality of its customers and determine what kind of content it will create in the future.

Marketing

There are many applications of AI technologies in the marketing sector. For example, websites use chatbots to offer personalized customer service to their clients. Chatbots are AI bots that mimic human conversations. Similarly, AI implementations help analyze customer data to predict buying patterns.

E-commerce

E-commerce companies use recommender systems to enhance the user experience of their customers. These recommender systems are based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. AI engineers help these companies create, manage, and optimize their recommender systems.

FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions

What courses will I need to study to become an AI engineer?

To become an AI engineer, one option is to Learn AI and Machine Learning by Yourself. Or a more efficient and easy way would be to take an industry-relevant artificial intelligence course. You should pick a course covering the basic and advanced concepts of this field and the relevant technologies. Moreover, it would be best to pick an online course as it lets you study comfortably from anywhere at your own pace.

For example, AnalytixLabs offers a job-oriented Artificial Intelligence Engineering Course that teaches you the necessary AI engineering skills using in-demand techniques and tools such as Keras, PyTorch, Python, TensorFlow, and OpenCV in collaboration with IBM. The course offers 11 projects and 120 hours of self-study hours. Enrolling in such courses would certify you as an AI expert, making you eligible for various company AI roles.

How much do AI engineers make?

According to Glassdoor, the average artificial intelligence engineer salary is ₹959,424 annually in India. The packages may start from INR 500,000 and go as high as INR 1,665,355 per year. With senior-level experience, one may earn up to 36 lacs/yr

Concluding Thoughts

Artificial Intelligence as a frontier expands its limits to benefit businesses and individuals. Its popularity and robustness have been the reason for the increased confidence of ventures, governments, and businesses of all sizes and locations in AI-based applications. The leading AI discipline offers niche job prospects for AI and ML developers to have subtle career growth. What one needs is proper guidance, and training, and one should know about the latest requirements for artificial intelligence while preparing for a job role. Connect to the experts from AnalytixLabs to give a kick-start to your career as an AI engineer.

You may also like to read:

1. How To Learn Artificial Intelligence

2. Components Of Artificial Intelligence – How It Works?

3. Complete Guide on the Artificial Intelligence Course Syllabus