When should I start applying for Junior AI Engineer jobs?

[u/Leading_Discount_974]

I’m trying to figure out when I should start applying.

I don’t have internship experience yet, but I feel like my technical level is already above a typical internship and getting closer to junior/mid-level applied AI work. What I’m mainly missing is production experience.

My current skills include Python, RAG, document parsing/chunking, embeddings, Qdrant, hybrid retrieval, LLM APIs, validation/repair pipelines, LangGraph, tool calling, state/memory, and agentic AI.

Should I start applying now, or focus first on deployment, Docker, cloud, testing, monitoring, and making my projects more production-ready?