What is a Prompt Engineer?

A prompt engineer is someone who specializes in crafting generative AI inputs (prompts) that reliably return useful outputs or specific results.

When the internet was young, searching for information took more creativity than it does now and essentially, everyone had to be a prompt engineer. In the 1990s, end users simply accepted that it would take several iterations of the same query to get a search engine to return relevant results.

Today, generative AI users are facing a similar problem. That’s one reason why prompt engineering has actually become a job that involves creating libraries of high quality prompts, prompt chains and prompt templates that make it faster for end users to use generative models for specific tasks.

Unlike traditional engineering jobs in IT, however, a prompt engineer’s job is likely to include linguistics and behavioral sciences as well as programming. Although a number of companies are advertising job openings for prompt engineers, experts disagree whether this type of job will be necessary as the technology improves.

In the meantime, several startups have created platforms that allow prompt engineers to monetize their prompt templates. For example, PromptBase has created a marketplace that allows civilian engineers to sell the prompts they have written for DALL-E 2.