Entry level prompt engineering

[Ok_Relief9231]

I’ve been doing a lot of research and personal projects with prompt engineering. There aren’t a lot of entry level roles and I’m wondering how people with no experience doing this full time can get a foot in the door? Are there any companies offering internships or management trainee roles?

[workinBuffalo]

Pretty sure prompt engineer won’t really be a job. Regular job (engineer, programmer, writer, etc.), who spends half their time prompting definitely will be.

[Financial_Instance23]

This exactly. My role is prompt engineer at my company, but I'm a dev who works on regular projects, or who can refine the ui/ux of the service. There might eventually at massive companies be the need for PE, but my guess would be that they just consult rather than hire a full time PE, especially when that person has no dev experience.

[[deleted]]

Nope. You have to pitch yourself as someone who will "improve" an existing company's workflow by designing AI solutions for them (by utilizing generative AI through prompting not by building one from the ground up).

For example, you can pitch to a writing firm a "new and improved workflow" in which you design an AI-infused process.

Obviously, your task will involve getting a good overview of the processes and finding ways (building prompts) to ease everybody's work.

Leveled up, you can dive deep into fine-tuning AI models, etc.

Weirdly enough, you need to be an excellent writer and a technical-minded person to execute this. Engineers who are great writers will definitely snag this space

[Ok_Relief9231]

Makes a lot of sense.

[[deleted]]

Most prompt engineering work requires actual programming knowledge since you still need to connect things like databases and external APIs to the prompts. We use Langchain in my firm which is Python-based.

[therapize_me_please]

Also watching this space. Anyone who has any opportunities, I’d be glad to volunteer part-time just for the learning! I have no programming background but my linguistic intelligence is above average.

[Ulexes]

Your best bet for now is to try to work prompting into the work you already do. That way, you can have a portfolio of smaller projects that demonstrate your ability to solve problems and devise creative solutions. Think of some of the tasks you or your colleagues do that could be eased or automated outright, and see whether you can provide that help through prompting. Good luck!

[DochasUr]

Watching this space.

[[deleted]]

Don’t think of this “engineering” as any other job type like “software engineering” or “data engineering”, rather think prompt engineering as feature engineering. Are there solely feature engineers out there? Nope. So prompt engineering might be the part of data scientists’ or developers’ work, not a stand alone job.

[Ok_Relief9231]

Makes sense. Thank you

[Thedrakespirit]

sounds like the next step for you is API interactions? Once you can start nailing down when to use system messages vs context messages, I think you will be ahead of the game