A learning roadmap for engineers who already ship models

You already know how to train and deploy. The next gains usually come from sharper evaluation and cleaner data, not more architecture trivia.

Strengthen foundations selectively

Pick one weak axis—optimization, linear algebra for attention, or probability for calibration—and study it in short, applied bursts tied to a project.

Read papers with a purpose

Choose papers that answer a question you have this quarter. Summarize assumptions, metrics, and what you would try in your codebase.

Teach to learn

Internal tech talks and written postmortems force clarity. They are one of the fastest ways to harden intuition.