A reality check for aspiring GenAI engineers in 2026
The job title exists, the jobs exist, and the skill gap is wider than anyone admits. Here's what actually gets you hired.
Every second LinkedIn post this year is about a 'GenAI engineer' role. Most are cosplay. A few are real — and the real ones share three things: production RAG experience, evals discipline, and opinions about cost.
What hiring managers actually look for
They don't want notebooks. They want systems that survived at least one Friday night outage. Experience beats credentials — but without either, a mentor-led capstone is the fastest manufactured-experience signal.
Where people get stuck
Evals. Everyone can ship a RAG demo; fewer can tell you why they chose BM25 hybrid over dense-only, and almost nobody can tell you their offline/online eval split. If you own that conversation, you get hired.