Trullion’s Post

I have been criticized for asking design pattern questions in my AI engineering interviews. Granted, most of the criticism came from the candidates whose first question was 'What's a design pattern.' But some of it came from serious people who were genuinely mystified why I was delaying digging into optimizers and GMM models and wasting time on college courses no one remembers. To be honest, when I started at Trullion I didn't anticipate how important essential software engineering principles were to AI development. It was only after a few years and lots of mistakes that I learned just how much software engineering I needed to know to build an AI system. I recently had the opportunity to chat with one of my primary mentors in all things AI, Eugene Agichtein who has spent decades at the cutting edge of NLP and LLMs. As I was describing the work we were doing, he kept laughing and repeating, "Yes, as it turns out engineering competence still matters." As deep as he is in the theoretical realm, he still forces his students to write good, tested code because, in the end, innovation demands a foundation. To this end, we are hiring an AI backend engineer to join the AI org at Trullion. We are looking for someone with the experience, and more importantly the passion for writing good software. I am not going to lie, we are not building widgets or simple API calls, so this position is not for everyone. But if you are excited about building complex systems and solving difficult problems, please click the link in the first comment.