Prompt Engineer: Skills, Projects & Interview Questions (2026)

Beginner · 1-2 months

Foundations & core tooling

Build: Build a prompt pattern library and a structured-output extractor that returns valid JSON.

Intermediate · 2-3 months

Applied, real-world builds

Build: Ship a RAG chatbot with a proper evaluation harness measuring accuracy and win rates.

Advanced · 3-4 months

Production, scale & specialization

Build: Deploy a production LLM feature with guardrails, cost routing, and monitoring.

Build and document a set of reusable prompt templates for common tasks.

Skills: Prompt Design & Iteration, LLM Fundamentals, Few-shot & Chain-of-Thought

Prompt an LLM to reliably return validated JSON for a downstream system.

Skills: Prompt Design & Iteration, LLM APIs & Tool Calling, Python

Score prompt variants against a labeled test set and track win rates.

Skills: Evaluation & Testing, Python, Prompt Design & Iteration

Ground answers in a document corpus with retrieval and citation prompts.

Skills: RAG & Context Engineering, LLM APIs & Tool Calling, Python

Improve multi-step reasoning accuracy with decomposition and self-check prompts.

Skills: Few-shot & Chain-of-Thought, Prompt Design & Iteration, Evaluation & Testing

Build an agent that calls functions/tools to complete a real workflow.

Skills: LLM APIs & Tool Calling, Prompt Design & Iteration, Python

Attack and then harden an LLM app against injection and jailbreaks.

Skills: Safety & Prompt Injection Defense, Evaluation & Testing, Prompt Design & Iteration

Route requests across models to cut cost while holding quality on an eval set.

Skills: Cost & Latency Optimization, Evaluation & Testing, LLM APIs & Tool Calling

Ship an end-to-end LLM feature with evals, guardrails, and monitoring.

Skills: Evaluation & Testing, Safety & Prompt Injection Defense, RAG & Context Engineering

Coordinate multiple LLM agents to solve a task with planning and verification.

Skills: LLM APIs & Tool Calling, Prompt Design & Iteration, Python