As AI projects mature, job titles get more specific. Three you will often see are AI agent developer, RAG developer and machine-learning (ML) engineer. They overlap, but each is best at a different kind of problem.
RAG developer — "answer from our knowledge"
Builds systems that search your documents and data, then use an AI model to answer questions with sources.
- Typical projects: internal knowledge assistants, customer support bots, product spec search.
- Key skills: document processing, search and vector databases, prompt design, evaluation, access control.
AI agent developer — "take actions for us"
Builds assistants that plan steps and use tools: reading emails, updating CRMs, creating orders, calling APIs.
- Typical projects: order intake automation, ticket triage and routing, back-office workflows.
- Key skills: API integration, workflow design, error handling, permissions and human approval steps.
ML engineer — "predict or classify from our data"
Trains, deploys and maintains custom models using your historical data.
- Typical projects: demand forecasting, fraud or anomaly detection, recommendation engines, image recognition.
- Key skills: statistics, feature engineering, model training, deployment and monitoring.
Quick comparison
| RAG developer | Agent developer | ML engineer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main input | Documents & knowledge | Tasks & systems | Historical data |
| Main output | Accurate answers | Completed actions | Predictions |
| Uses existing models? | Yes | Yes | Often trains custom ones |
| Time to first value | Weeks | Weeks | Often longer |
Which one first?
If staff and customers keep asking the same questions, start with RAG. If your team does repetitive steps across several systems, start with an agent. If you need forecasts or detection from large historical datasets, you need an ML engineer. Many projects combine all three over time — and a strong applied developer can often cover the first two.
Not sure which you need? Describe your problem and we will recommend the right profile, or hire a Python developer.