Half the 'how to become an AI engineer' advice tells you to start with linear algebra. After years on backend, here's the honest, narrower path — what to learn, what to skip, and what the job actually looks like in 2026.
Model Context Protocol turns your internal services into something an agent can call without bespoke glue. What MCP actually is, what it costs to expose one well, and the patterns that hold up when the caller is an LLM instead of a UI.
Retrieval-augmented generation has been wrapped in enough mystique to obscure that it's mostly an ETL problem. What the pipeline actually looks like, where the real engineering happens, and the failure modes that have nothing to do with the model.
How resolving redundant API calls and leveraging caching transformed a sluggish billing generation process into a performant operation.
Click 'pay' twice when the page hangs and you shouldn't get charged twice. Here's how to make that promise — with one Redis key, a TTL, and a small race-condition guard.
If you wouldn't pour the foundation after the roof, why do we keep building UIs before we know what data lives behind them? A case for designing the schema first — not because backend matters more, but because it's the part that can't be undone.