Building a Personal Brand Online for AI Engineers

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about personal branding as an AI engineer: most advice tells you to “just post consistently” without addressing the real problem. How do you create enough quality content while working a demanding job?

I struggled with this for months. I knew I needed to build a presence online, but churning out LinkedIn posts and blog articles felt inauthentic. Everything I wrote sounded like everyone else. Then I discovered an approach that changed everything: long-form content first, AI-assisted reformatting second.

Let me share exactly how I build my personal brand while keeping every piece of content genuinely mine.

Table of Contents

Step 1: Define your unique professional niche

When I started building my personal brand, I made the mistake of trying to be “the AI guy.” Too broad. I was competing with everyone. What actually worked was getting specific: I focused on AI implementation, taking AI from concept to production in real business environments.

Reflect on your unique combination of skills to understand what truly sets you apart. Are you particularly adept at machine learning model optimization? Do you excel at translating complex AI concepts for non-technical stakeholders? Do you have domain expertise in healthcare, finance, or another industry? These specific strengths become the foundation of your professional niche.

Here’s a framework that helped me:

Ask yourself these questions:

  • What projects have I worked on where I felt most energized?
  • What do colleagues consistently ask me for help with?
  • What problems can I solve that others struggle with?
  • What unique combination of skills do I have?

For AI engineers with over three years of experience, deep specialization in a complex technology domain can maximize earning potential. If you’re earlier in your career, a broader skill set provides maximum flexibility. I took a hybrid approach: AI implementation as my primary focus, with enough breadth to lead cross-functional teams.

Warning: Avoid trying to be everything to everyone. Your niche should be specific enough to make you memorable, yet broad enough to allow professional growth. “AI Engineer” is too vague. But “AI Engineer specializing in production LLM systems for enterprise”? People remember that.

Research unmet needs in your industry, align them with your strengths, and craft a clear statement of what you do and who you help. This becomes the foundation everything else builds on.

Step 2: Craft a compelling online presence

Your online presence is how people find you. Most engineers treat LinkedIn like a resume dump and wonder why nobody reaches out.

Optimize your LinkedIn profile properly. Get a professional headshot. Make your headline specific to your niche, not just “AI Engineer.” In your about section, highlight actual achievements with numbers. “Reduced inference latency by 40%” beats “passionate about AI” every time.

You can use AI to help refine your profile and make your writing tighter. But here’s the catch: if everything sounds polished and perfect, it feels fake. Leave some personality in there. The goal is to sound like a real person who’s good at their job, not a corporate brochure.

Step 3: My content strategy - long-form first, AI reformatting second

Here’s the thing about AI-generated content that most people get wrong: they use AI to create ideas from scratch. That’s backwards. The content ends up generic, sounding like everyone else, because it IS everyone else. It’s just the average of what’s already out there.

My approach is different. I create long-form YouTube videos where I share my actual thoughts, real experiences from working at big tech, and genuine expertise I’ve built over years of implementing AI systems. These videos capture my authentic voice: the way I explain things, my specific opinions, my real-world examples.

Then I use AI purely for reformatting.

Here’s how it works in practice:

  1. Record authentic long-form content. I film YouTube videos covering topics I genuinely care about. No script optimization for AI, just me explaining what I know from real experience.

  2. Extract transcripts. The video transcripts become my source material. These contain my actual words, my natural way of explaining concepts, my specific examples.

  3. AI reformats, not creates. I use AI to transform these transcripts into blog posts, shorter social content, and other formats. The AI isn’t generating ideas. It’s restructuring MY ideas for different platforms.

  4. Review for authenticity. Every piece gets reviewed to ensure it still sounds like me, not like generic AI output.

The result? I can publish consistently across multiple platforms while every piece traces back to my genuine expertise. When someone reads my blog, they’re getting the same insights I shared in my videos, just in a format that works better for reading.

This approach to using AI tools strategically lets me scale my reach without sacrificing authenticity. I’m not hiding that I use AI. I’m transparent about it. But there’s a massive difference between “AI wrote this for me” and “AI helped me reformat my own thoughts.”

Why this matters for your personal brand: Your unique experiences and perspectives are your competitive advantage. AI can help you reach more people with those insights, but it can’t replace the insights themselves. Start with substance: your real knowledge, your actual experiences, your genuine opinions. Then let AI help you distribute that substance more efficiently.

The biggest obstacle isn’t technical. It’s psychological. Many engineers feel they need to write everything from scratch or it “doesn’t count.” That’s limiting belief thinking. What matters is whether the ideas and expertise are genuinely yours. The formatting is just logistics.

Step 4: Engage with the AI community authentically

Building a personal brand isn’t just about broadcasting. You need to actually talk to people.

Find where AI professionals hang out: GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow, AI-focused Discord servers, Twitter/X. Don’t just lurk. Contribute to open source projects. Answer questions. Share what you’re learning and building.

The trick is being genuinely helpful, not performative. When you help someone debug their RAG pipeline or explain a concept clearly, people notice. That reputation compounds over time.

Share your failures too, not just wins. “Here’s what didn’t work when I tried X” is often more valuable than “Here’s my perfect solution.” It shows you’re a real practitioner, not someone regurgitating tutorials.

Step 5: Showcase real-world AI projects and success

Your projects are proof that you can actually build things. Without them, you’re just another person talking about AI.

Use GitHub and LinkedIn to showcase what you’ve built. But don’t just dump code. Write clear READMEs that explain: What problem does this solve? What was hard about building it? What did you learn?

Your project portfolio shows how you think, not just what you can code. Include the business context. Quantify results when possible: “Reduced manual review time by 60%” tells a better story than “built an AI classifier.”

Pick projects that represent your best work and align with where you want your career to go. Three solid projects with good documentation beat twenty half-finished repos.

Build Your Brand While Staying Authentic

The approach I’ve shared here has been a game changer for my own brand. Long-form content first, AI reformatting second. It solved the consistency problem without sacrificing authenticity. Every blog post, every social media update traces back to my genuine expertise captured on video.

But here’s what I’ve learned matters even more than the tactical stuff: having a community of other engineers who are building alongside you. When I started, I was figuring everything out alone. It took way longer than it needed to.

That’s exactly why I built the AI Native Engineer community. Inside, I share not just the polished tutorials, but the actual systems I use. How I structure my content pipeline, what tools work, and what doesn’t. You get direct access to ask questions and get feedback on your portfolio, content strategy, and positioning.

If you’re serious about building a personal brand that opens real career opportunities (not just vanity metrics), come join us. The engineers inside are actively building their presence while advancing their technical skills. That combination is what actually moves careers forward.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you use AI without your content sounding generic?

The key is using AI for reformatting, not creation. I record YouTube videos with my actual thoughts and expertise, then use AI to transform those transcripts into blog posts and shorter content. The ideas are genuinely mine. AI just helps with distribution across different formats.

How can I define my professional niche as an AI engineer?

Start by reflecting on past projects that excited you and identifying specific AI domains where you excel. What do colleagues ask you for help with? What unique combination of skills do you have? Get specific. “AI Engineer” is too broad. “AI Engineer specializing in production LLM systems” is memorable.

What steps should I take to create a compelling online presence?

Optimize your LinkedIn profile with a professional photo, keyword-rich headline, and detailed about section highlighting your achievements. Focus on presenting your unique skills and make sure your content reflects your authentic professional identity, not generic AI-generated fluff.

How can I engage with the AI community authentically?

Participate in communities where you can contribute real insights, ask intelligent questions, and join discussions. Share actual experiences, both wins and failures. Authenticity builds trust faster than polished but hollow content.

What types of content should I create to establish myself as a thought leader?

Create content that provides real value: technical tutorials, case studies, analyses of emerging AI technologies. Focus on solving actual problems your audience faces. If you use my approach, start with long-form content (video, podcast, detailed articles) where you share genuine expertise, then reformat for other platforms.

How can I effectively showcase my AI projects online?

Develop a well-organized portfolio on platforms like LinkedIn or GitHub. Include project documentation that details technical challenges and quantifies impact. Most importantly, tell the story behind each project. What problem you solved, how you approached it, and what you learned.

Zen van Riel - Senior AI Engineer

Zen van Riel - Senior AI Engineer

Senior AI Engineer & Teacher

As an expert in Artificial Intelligence, specializing in LLMs, I love to teach others AI engineering best practices. With real experience in the field working at big tech, I aim to teach you how to be successful with AI from concept to production. My blog posts are generated from my own video content on YouTube.

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