AI engineer is the fastest-growing engineering title in India, and it is a software role rather than a research one. The day-to-day is building applications on top of models: retrieval pipelines, evaluation harnesses, tool-calling workflows and the guardrails around them. Employers screen hard for evidence that you have shipped something users touched, because the field is full of candidates whose exposure ends at tutorial notebooks. Pune demand comes from GCCs building internal AI platforms and from product companies adding AI features to existing software.