My Next Career Progression And Why?

Most of my career, over the last 15 years, has been spent on software coding & implementation.

To move up the career ladder, there are four areas that I need to consider:

1. Coding & implementation
2. Architecture & technical decisions
3. Collaboration & leadership
4. Strategy, planning & analysis

My next career progression should not only involve coding & implementation but also technical decisions, leadership and strategy planning. This puts me in the Senior Product Engineering roles and I can then naturally progress in leadership directions — Engineering lead, Engineering manager & then to Head of Engineering roles.

To make the next move more relevant and to stay ahead I must evolve in to AI frontier roles that involve the above areas. The AI frontier demands the knowledge of RAG and enterprise knowledge systems, Agentic AI and orchestration, AI evaluation and production engineering and Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE).

The knowledge of the above systems would then allow me to look for Senior AI Product Engineer, Applied AI Engineer, AI Applications Engineer, and Forward Deployed Engineer roles in addition to the Senior Product Engineer roles.