Illustrative career stages, the technical track versus management, and what to build next. Current market benchmark figures are on the salary page.
Companies actively hiring for this role in India right now.
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Most postings want a software engineering base (2-4 years) plus hands-on LLM integration work, either from a product team or from side projects with RAG pipelines and API-based agents; a pure research or data science background without shipping experience is usually a harder sell for this specific title.
Yes, this is one of the more common internal transitions right now; backend engineers who pick up LangChain/LlamaIndex, vector search, and evaluation tooling on real product features are being pulled into applied-AI pods at companies like Freshworks and Razorpay within 12-18 months.