NOW HIRING: Prompt Engineer
You can add the word “engineer” to the end of almost any job description and it suddenly sounds more technical, more important, or more elite. In recent times, that has happened a lot. Marketers became growth engineers. The audio technician became an audio engineer. Sales assistants became sales engineers. Pretty soon Venture Capitalists are going to be referred to as growth finance engineers. Bankers: debt engineers. You get the picture.
Whatever the reason for the trend, engineer is one of those terms that has taken on a meaning that doesn’t totally capture what it originally intended. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - language evolves and changes over time and there is very little you can do to stop it, even if you are the Académie Française. However, the new meaning of engineer is interesting - more than just adding a touch of class to a job title, it has come to represent someone who works on a specific problem as an individual contributor using some level of technical know-how. Soft-skills focused jobs don’t really seem to get the engineer treatment - it just doesn’t feel right. But hard, technical skills, even if they are entirely unrelated to engineering, seem to get that title.
Up until this point, creative skills don’t seem to get the engineering title either. While any good engineer would tell you that creativity is a key element to their job, they don’t always get associated with being the most creative sort. Popular opinion would hold that they are creative problem solvers, but maybe not the greatest when it comes to writing poetry, or some other traditionally “creative endeavor”. (I have found this to generally be untrue and I know a lot of engineers who are very artistically creative in their free time. I am just talking about perception here).
Similarly, creative folks, don’t necessarily seem to get associated with engineering-like traits all that frequently either. Any good creative will tell you that a big part of what they do is the process in which they do it. They use their own version of math to come up with new ideas. I am reminded of the book How to Write One Song, which basically outlines the creative process as being just that, a process. While it’s not quite the same as the engineering process involved in, say, building a bridge, it’s still a process. But this is just how life is sometimes, people get put into boxes based on their careers and it’s hard to see past that.
But things do change. Sales people used to just be sales people. Now they are “Chief Revenue Officers”. Coders used to be just coders. Now they are software engineers. This happens for a variety of reasons, one of which is technology changes the way those people work.
The same thing might be happening to a bevy of creative industries today. The rise of AI-powered tools like Chat-GPT and Claude are not going to replace creative work - the technology isn’t there yet and who knows when that will happen. But this technology should be able to provide tools that enhance creativity or put more process into the creative process. Technology doesn’t necessarily create jobs or destroy jobs - it just changes things around. There will be some jobs that start to appear, like Prompt Engineer. And other that might disappear, like computer, which used to literally be the job title of somebody who would do computations for a living. Human computers went away with the rise of electrical computers, but a lot of them got drafted to be the first computer programmers.
It’s easy to think that the same thing is going to happen with creative jobs, but it’s likely not that simple. Creativity isn’t just about creating something that a person wants - it’s about translating what the person says they want into what the person actually wants and then creating something around that. Most people are poor communicators of their ideas - they see something in their mind, but have trouble translating that into words. Chat-GPT won’t be able to replace a copywriter entirely because half of copywriter’s job is figuring out what an editor actually means when they say “write up something about XYZ topic”.
This is true outside of creative AI tools as well. There are a lot of clinical diagnostic support tools that run algorithms to help doctors diagnose diseases that are harder to uncover. Many of them use some variation of computer vision to read labs or medical images to make these diagnoses. While some of this technology is very strong and effective, there is still a lot of nuance about patients that can get missed if you only look at a handful of images from scans. Doctors will need to review data provided by these tools and make a decision based on said data. Interpretation of data is going to be tantamount for any job moving forward. This isn’t anything new, but its importance is just growing.
Creatives become prompt engineers, doctors will become data analysts, and everyone will be using AI in some form or fashion (if you are not already). It’s not ready to completely replace human output. Its just another new tool in the tool belt of a almost anybody today. Most jobs require creativity. And creative jobs are always changing. Gone are the days of sitting around on a couch, drinking a scotch, smoking a cigarette and coming up with an idea completely out of thin air. I doubt that was ever actually happening the way the show Mad Men portrayed it to happen. And that’s likely a good thing. Those guys made some bad ads.
Job Description
A prompt engineer is a creative technical professional who is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining the prompts and user interfaces used to create content, media, and other projects via conversational systems and large language models.
Key Responsibilities Include:
Designing and implementing conversational prompts and interfaces that create user-friendly and effective information and content.
Use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to better create content that is relevant to our business and uses our marketing tone and voice.
Produce high-quality and high volume content that drives the growth of our business.
Collaborating with product managers, designers, and other engineers to understand the goals and requirements of a conversational system and create prompts that align with those goals.
Testing and evaluating prompts to ensure that they are functioning properly and providing positive user experience.
Troubleshooting and resolving issues that arise with prompts and interfaces.
Continuously improving and updating prompts based on user feedback and data analysis.
Keeping up-to-date with the latest developments in conversational design and technology.
The ideal candidate for this role would have:
Advanced skills utilizing a variety of LLMs in order to generate interesting content pertinent to our business.
Proven ability to utilize tools that do written and verbal communications on your behalf. We don’t expect you to know how to actually read or write effectively, just make the robot do it well.
Motivation and commitment to creating unique content that drives our objectives without sacrificing our personality.
Ability to crosscheck and audit outputs of LLMs based on common sense and the ability to use logic to explain outputs.
High level understanding of how natural language processing and machine learning techniques work so as not to get fooled by flaws in models in use.
Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
Zero familiarity with programming languages required.
A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field is typically required, but relevant experience may be substituted in some cases.
10+ years of experience.