I landed a Big Tech AI job. Treating my career like a science lab helped me overcome my fear of learning AI.

Nitya Kumar, 25, landed a UX design job at Adobe in November 2025 by treating her career like a science lab, experimenting with AI tools such as Cursor and Gemini to build quirky prototypes. She overcame her fear of learning AI without a machine learning background and now leads AI playground workshops for other designers at Adobe in India.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nitya Kumar, 25, an Adobe employee who lives in India. The following has been edited for length and clarity. I landed a product design role at Meta straight out of college in 2022. By 2024, I saw the industry pivoting toward AI and wanted to learn new AI design skills. During this process, I stopped seeing my career as a ladder with a focus on moving upward. In my view, all work and no play keeps the Big Tech offers https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-salaries-compensation-data-ai-talent-wars-silicon-valley away, so I started treating my career like a science lab, giving myself the freedom to experiment. This helped me overcome my fear of learning a new technology and land a role working with AI https://www.businessinsider.com/raise-us-ai-workers-supporters-openai-anthropic-2026-6 at Adobe. Embracing my inner 'mad scientist' helped me get an AI job at Adobe I went to art school in the US and didn't have a formal machine learning background. I took my AI education https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-workers-learning-ai-tools-after-work-productivity-jobs-amazon-2026-6 into my own hands, learning as I went through YouTube videos and friends. Instead of trying to learn everything about AI at once, I focused on experimenting with Cursor https://www.businessinsider.com/cursor-ceo-michael-truell-spacex-elon-musk-anthropic-2026-6 with my friends, who could hold me accountable. I treated this process like a formula: one hour of Cursor a day + seven days = a functional AI prototype. I love dance, and by the end of the seven days, I had created a fun game that could detect and track the gestures of a user dancing in their room. It helped me develop a vibe coding workflow https://www.businessinsider.com/beginners-guide-ai-vibe-coding-lovable-base44-claude-2026-6 , which involved using different AI tools for different processes. Though I started out with Gemini and Cursor, I gradually gained more confidence with other tools, too, like Figma MCP. Instead of just building safe case studies with AI, I unleashed my inner "mad scientist." For example, I created a tool that generated Matcha recipes. I used Gemini to develop and refine prompts I'd feed into Claude to vibe-code the product. These quirky experiments helped me gain a grasp of the AI landscape and the tools that exist, and, I think, helped me stand out in interviews. They made interviewers laugh, and we'd start debating about matcha flavors and play around with the tools I'd built. After roughly four months of intentional AI experimentation, I landed a UX design job at Adobe, which I started in November 2025. I like how the role involves developing agentic AI experiences, including conversational AI assistants https://www.businessinsider.com/how-ai-shopping-changing-online-retail-2026-5 . My 'science lab' strategy has helped me to support others When I got to Adobe, there were still a lot of skills I wanted to learn, but my experimentation with AI up to that point helped me build confidence. After around three months, I realized I wanted to share my skills with my design team. Every other Friday, I lead an AI playground workshop for other designers at Adobe in India. We come together online, experiment with new tools, and share how we're using AI-assisted workflows in our day-to-day jobs. We collaborate on how to stay ahead of this technical curve that we're all facing. Designers come to me for support with debugging problems or building prototypes with AI, and my toolkit and confidence grow as I help them. It has been a nice way to grow my leadership skills. Treating my career like a science lab has not only helped me transition into an AI role without a machine learning background, but it's also helped me succeed at it. I feel like I've mastered vibe coding, fuelled my creativity, and become a better designer.