"I used AI as my own personal tutor" — from rejected Big 4 applicant to six-figure AI engineer in 3 years

Six years ago, Nyaradzo got rejected from a Big 4 firm. Last week, her former interviewer sat next to her in first class.

Honestly, she chose to turn her rejection season into skills and income, using AI for speed all the way through.

By the time AI tools became serious, she already knew how to code. But she didn't know how to build *with* AI — RAG pipelines, multi-agent systems, LLM-powered applications. There's no clean roadmap for that transition, and she wasn't going back to school for it.

So she used AI itself as her own personal tutor. "I'd build something, hit a wall, and instead of just asking for a fix, I'd ask it to explain the architecture, the tradeoffs, the reasoning behind the approach," she says.

That's how she went from software engineer to someone who could build a RAG pipeline on a podcast transcript library, design a multi-agent codebase with Planner, Builder, and Reviewer agents using MongoDB Atlas as the memory layer, and work with LLM-powered applications at a technical level.

Once she had the AI engineering skills, she started running online Claude Code workshops. Before and after every workshop, she had participants fill out surveys — then fed the results into Claude to identify patterns. The insight: the people getting the most value weren't random individuals, but knowledge workers at organizations who needed practical AI fluency fast.

She took that analysis, started posting about the workshops on LinkedIn with that specific framing, and began getting hired to teach at conferences — including Black Is Tech Houston, where 92% of attendees came in at a confidence level of 1 or 2 and 93% left at a 4 or 5.

She also built something she calls her FutureMe GPT — a custom GPT fed with her income goals, vision, and the person she's trying to become. Conversations with FutureMe led to securing five-figure deals, the decision to relocate, and being accepted to study AI at Oxford.

"Year one out of corporate I made around $20K. By year two I crossed six figures. By year three, I was experiencing privileges I'm still hoping my nervous system gets adjusted to," she says. "Every income stream traces back to something I built or something I could demonstrate. AI was the accelerant."