Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late? I don't know where to get started, would you just look like a junior or entry level candidate by doing that?
We hire “AI engineers,” and honestly the expectation most of the time is that they can demonstrate an actual interest and real work in or with AI. Mind you, we are not a frontier lab, but AI gaming company, and someone with senior dev knowledge is hugely valuable to the team if they actually have rolled up their sleeves and built with AI and push to improve our operations with AI. There isn’t an academic signal that would tell us you are really AI forward, and so much of the engineering job is super charged by having a real dev background for us.
I can’t say if this will change of course, and I only speak for a small gaming startup.
>Given the backlash amongst gamers against AI, how does being an “AI gaming” company work?
They are delusional or know nothing about how development works. I can promise you there's not a single major game studio left out there not leveraging AI in significant parts of their workflows at this point.
AI helps the most with boilerplate work: Those 3 hours of boring, follow-the-design coding can now be implemented in 5-10 minutes. I then jump into the more interesting work and cleanup.
Other things are easier. For example, saying "Refactor this class to use XYZ serialization library" and having it done in 5 minutes instead of 90 minutes frees me to do the more intellectually stimulating work.
Likewise, when it comes to AI and design, what I can do is type in ideas in a stream-of-conscious way into a prompt, and then it looks at code and comes out with sane text that I can go edit.
BUT: There's interesting things you can do with AI that are harder to do by hand. I ran an experiment where I asked AI to rewrite a method to not use an ORM, which is useful if you need to optimize some DB code. Shopify is having AI write two native versions of their mobile app instead of maintaining a React Native codebase. Lean on the tool to do interesting things that otherwise are too labor intense to do by hand.
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Don't be like the guy who rejects an IDE, or the guy who only works in assembly.
I didn't say LLMs are not useful. It makes some of the boring parts easy and less time consuming. But it does not add it to what makes building something rewarding, on its own.
Imagine building LEGO using a robot? Where is the fun in that?
You can use it at different levels of granularity to fit your needs. I find a lot of the fun in designing the way the code interacts and class/module boundaries and responsibilities. So AI takes away the typing (code) part and makes it more fun at times. It give me more time to focus my thoughts.
It (focusing on the design) is about as fun as taking part in the 4 days specification/planning marathon with a team whose super intelligent members cannot comprehend trivialities and nitpicking is needed, as they really like to code and cv-boosting coding and engineering. and are willing to go large lengths to do any overengineered over-complicated contraption that slightly resembles the solution. Exhausting. At least I can yell at the AI without negative consequences. For now.
most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models
Absolutely; I'd check out AI Engineering by Chip Huyen to get a fundamental understanding of the space and do a couple of side projects in the area to get familiar and be able to speak to the nuances of working with LLMs, and that will be enough to start working to transition and apply for relevant roles.
It’s for sure not too late, why would it be? The industry is young and evolving. It’s not even clear what an AI job is exactly, the definition and job titles have been changing a lot
Maybe - as with most ultra competitive industries you either know someone or have some extremely niche yet hyper productive knowledge others don’t have.
I have multiple Senior AI Engineer roles posted (really, senior / staff SWE who has reps and sets using AI for development, perhaps working with AI infra) right now. Right now it's a lot of getting Claude working well, model routing working well, and getting us off of commercial LLMs. Trying desperately to hire, but get a lot of "AI-pilled" non-developers in the same way I would open SWE roles ten years ago and get constant "Software Bootcamp" grads. These roles exist, in my anecdotal experience of having multiple of these roles open on my team lol. Perhaps this is just 1/100 ads, or 1/1000.
how do you interview for those? I think interviewing has not kept up with how things are, leetcode rounds seem to make even less sense nowadays and feel even more of a hazing ritual.
Personally seeing an "AI engineer" job posting I would not even apply, despite having many years experience in general, and experimenting/running models on my own hardware and being responsible at work for several skills, mcp and so on, it just feels that that kind of job is looking for some ex-openai/anthropic/ai-lab kind of skillset, which is not something a lot of people have; if this is what you are looking for of course it is what it is.
I think these days being "AI conversant" should be expected for senior/staff positions, it can also be listed a requirement, but not sure putting it as a job title, it feels more like having "IDE staff software engineer" which is not something anybody outside of jetbrains/vs.code would do.
sounds fun, I had fun fine-tuning some open weights models for local use, and I run a free public inference engine here: https://stateofutopia.com/services/ai/ it's fun.
