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How to become an AI Security Engineer
Prompt injection defense, model supply chain, data leakage, and access control. Secure AI systems end to end.
- 5phases in the roadmap
- 15topics to work through
- 74graded practice questions
- Freeno payment, ever
The AI Security Engineer roadmap
Each topic below carries a study note, real reading, and practice questions in the app. A topic unlocks when you pass the one before it, so the order is the path, so you are never guessing what to learn next.
Phase 1AI security foundations
The LLM threat model
AI security starts from one fact traditional web security misses: a model follows instructions in its input, so any untrusted text - user, document, or web page - can act as code.
OWASP LLM Top 10
The OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications is the field's shared map of what goes wrong: prompt injection, insecure output handling, sensitive data disclosure, excessive agency, supply chain, and more.
Trust boundaries and untrusted input
Every AI system has a boundary between trusted instructions and untrusted content - user input, retrieved documents, tool output.
Phase 2Prompt and input attacks
Direct prompt injection
The most common LLM attack: a user embeds instructions that override your system prompt.
Indirect (second-order) injection
The dangerous cousin of direct injection: the payload hides in content the model later reads - a wiki page, an email, a web result - and fires when retrieved.
Jailbreaks and guardrail bypass
Attackers rephrase endlessly to slip past a forbidden-content rule.
Phase 3Tool and execution security
Least-privilege tool scoping
Excessive agency turns one injection into total compromise.
Sandboxing execution
When an agent runs generated code or calls powerful tools, isolation is the control.
Multi-tenant data isolation
In a shared system, one tenant's data must never reach another's answers.
Phase 4AI security data protection
Sensitive data in prompts and logs
Prompts and their logs are a data store.
Output filtering and exfiltration
A model can be induced to smuggle secrets into a URL or image that phones home when rendered.
Model and plugin supply chain
Third-party models and plugins run with your app's trust and access, and public registries have shipped compromised components before.
Phase 5Detection and response
Red-teaming AI systems
Functional tests check intended behavior; they say nothing about resistance to an attacker.
Monitoring and abuse detection
You cannot respond to what you cannot see.
Incident response for AI
When a flaw is actively leaking, the first move is containment - disable the vulnerable capability to stop the bleeding - then investigate scope and remediate.
Reading for this path
The primary sources behind the topics above, all free to read.
- OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework
- Anthropic: reduce prompt injection
- Simon Willison: prompt injection series
Coming from another job?
Most people on this path arrived from somewhere else: engineering, analysis, testing, product, support, compliance, design. Onboarding asks what you do today and builds a short starter run out of the gaps, so you begin from what you already know rather than from chapter one. See how it works.
Other AI career paths
AI Solutions Architect
System design, model selection, build-vs-buy, and scaling and cost. Architect enterprise AI solutions that hold up in production.
AI Strategist
Opportunity sizing, build-vs-buy, and adoption strategy. Decide where AI creates real business value.
AI Systems Engineer
GPUs, distributed training, kernels, and memory and throughput optimization. Make large models train and serve fast.
AI UX Designer
Human-AI interaction patterns, trust, uncertainty, and feedback loops. Design interfaces where people and models work well together.
Analytics Engineer
Data modeling, transformation pipelines, metrics, and data quality. Turn raw data into trusted datasets teams can build on.
Applied Scientist
Model adaptation, evaluation, and prototyping against real product problems. Take research from paper to production.
Start the AI Security Engineer path for free
The full study notes, the reading, and the practice questions behind every topic above are in the app. Answer one tonight and you have started.
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