30 sections
AI Engineering
The Definitive Practitioner Encyclopedia for 2026
Section 01
AI Product Reality & Risk Tiers
Maps AI product types to risk levels and sets the stage for everything that follows.
Section 02
Problem Framing & Task Taxonomy
Decomposes AI problems into evaluable tasks with clear success criteria.
Section 03
Evaluation Strategy & Operating Model
The evaluation bible — defines quality, measurement, and shipping discipline across all AI systems.
Section 04
Ground Truth & What Good Looks Like
Clarifies what correctness means and how to agree on it.
Section 05
Quality Dimensions & Metrics
Turns quality into measurable dimensions and thresholds.
Section 06
Prompt & Tool Architecture
Structures prompts and tools for reliability and control.
Section 07
RAG Foundations & Evaluation
Builds and evaluates retrieval-augmented generation systems end to end.
Section 08
Agent Architecture & Evaluation
Designs and evaluates multi-step agent systems that take real-world actions.
Section 09
Model Selection & Routing
Chooses the right model for each task and tier.
Section 10
Memory & Context Management
Balances recall, privacy, and context budgets.
Section 11
Fine-Tuning & Model Adaptation
When to fine-tune, data requirements, safety checks, evaluation gating, and ROI.
Section 12
Dataset Engineering & Pipelines
Builds, validates, and maintains evaluation datasets at production scale.
Section 13
Labeling & Annotation Operations
Runs labeling programs — tooling, workforce, quality control, and cost management.
Section 14
Human Review Infrastructure
Builds the systems and processes that make expert review consistent and scalable.
Section 15
Automated Eval Pipelines
Engineers the automated evaluation infrastructure — judges, runners, and CI integration.
Section 16
AI Security — From Prompt Injection to Infrastructure Defense
Full-stack AI security: OWASP LLM & Agentic Top 10, prompt injection, model theft, data poisoning, supply chain attacks, zero trust, SOC 2, ISO 27001/42001, EU AI Act, and NIST AI frameworks.
Section 17
Production Monitoring & Observability
Runtime telemetry, drift detection, alerting, incident response, reliability engineering, and operational excellence for enterprise AI systems including agents, RAG, and multi-model architectures.
Section 18
Regression Testing & Release Gates
CI/CD integration, golden set automation, deployment gating infrastructure, cost controls, safety regression, and business KPI gates.
Section 19
Deployment & Runtime Control
Serving infrastructure, model versioning, feature flags, canary rollouts, runtime routing, caching strategies, rate limiting, and rollback systems for enterprise AI deployment.
Section 20
Reliability, Failure & Recovery
Fallback chains, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, incident response, chaos engineering, and resilience patterns for AI systems.
Section 21
Voice & Real-Time Systems
Latency engineering, perceptual UX, ASR/TTS evaluation, conversational quality, barge-in handling, real-time safety, streaming architecture, session state integrity, conversational recovery, cost governance, voice biometrics, and enterprise voice operations for real-time AI systems where milliseconds matter.
Section 22
Red-Teaming & Adversarial Testing
Finds the failures users and attackers will exploit before they do.
Section 23
Internationalization & Multilingual Systems
Locale routing, translation strategy, multilingual eval slices, cultural safety, and regional compliance.
Section 24
System Cost Engineering
Keeps inference cost aligned with business reality.
Section 25
Cost-Quality Tradeoffs
Optimizes quality without destroying margins or latency.
Section 26
Scaling Evaluation Systems
Scales eval infrastructure — pipelines, tooling, compute, and platform ops.
Section 27
Global Infrastructure & Kubernetes at Scale
Multi-region deployment, Kubernetes for AI, GPU orchestration, edge inference, training infrastructure, and platform operations at global scale.
Section 28
Multi-Tenant & Customer-Specific Evals
Adapts evaluation to customer-specific expectations at scale.
Section 29
Enterprise Governance, Org Design & Compliance
Connects evals to policy, audit, risk controls, team structure, and accountability.
Section 30
Pricing, Packaging & Unit Economics
Profit improvement, margins, SLAs, cost-to-serve, and contract pricing for AI products.