Post by Will Blackburn

A CTO of a billion-dollar software company is looking to hire their first AI engineer. He asked me what to look for. Here's what I said. What did I miss? First, decide if you want to find someone with an ML or full-stack background. I would choose ML if you are going deep, but if you want to move faster and test with customers, full-stack is preferred. Second, screen candidates in four main areas: 1. Have they shipped AI/LLM apps to production? 2. How do they think about and handle evals? 3. When would they suggest fine-tuning and how would they go about it? 4. What is their experience with AI infrastructure? I think those four areas quickly filter out the developers who have just slapped "AI" in front of their title without having the experience to back it up.