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 more like an ops position to me and less software engineer.

>getting us off of commercial LLM

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.

where are you planning to run your models?

...and the job of the hires will be figuring out where AI can be used?