Strong engineering fundamentals
You are a strong software engineer first. You have at least five years of experience building production systems and are comfortable designing complex systems that are reliable, maintainable, and scalable.
You think carefully about architecture, testing, observability, performance, and operational reliability.
You have built systems around large language models in production environments. You understand that successful AI products require thoughtful system design, not just calling an API.
You have experience designing prompts, managing context, orchestrating tool usage, and improving the reliability of model outputs.
You care deeply about measuring quality. You have experience building evaluation frameworks, designing datasets, and using experiments to guide improvements to prompts, models, and system architecture.
Retrieval and embedding systems
You have experience with retrieval augmented generation systems and understand how retrieval quality affects model performance.
You are comfortable working with embeddings, vector databases, and semantic search, and you understand how these approaches differ from traditional search and indexing systems.
You understand how modern language models work at a conceptual level and can speak about transformers, attention mechanisms, and the tradeoffs between different model architectures.
You understand the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs in practice. You think about hallucinations, prompt sensitivity, context limits, latency, and cost when designing systems.
Experimentation and iteration
You are comfortable running experiments across prompts, models, and system designs. You use evaluation data and real world feedback to guide improvements.