Becoming an AI Engineer in 2026: Interviewing, System Design, Evals | Aishwarya Reganti

Aishwarya Reganti joins me to break down how to become an AI engineer in 2026, including the skills software engineers should learn, how AI engineering interviews are changing, and what companies actually look for when hiring. We cover system design, evals, context engineering, AI agents, production reliability, AI product sense, and why judgment matters more than simply generating code with AI. If you’re a software engineer looking to break into AI engineering, this is for you. Aishwarya's GitHub: https://github.com/aishwaryanr/awesome-generative-ai-guideAishwarya's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/areganti/Learn from Aishwarya directly on Maven: https://maven.com/aishwarya-kiriti/genai-system-design0:00 Intro2:21 What is AI Engineering?7:51 Evals15:05 Interviewing for AI Eng and FDE roles18:58 AI Product Sense23:01 Enterprise AI Use Cases & Context Engineering32:19 When to Use AI and Why AI Systems Fail in Production42:08 Multi-Agent Systems and Coding Agent Workflows48:26 Breaking into AI Eng as a SWE