Hiring an AI Engineer: How to Look Past the Demo
A scorecard for hiring an AI engineer for production: what a demo hides, the four areas to test in the interview, and one example of a permission check.
Hiring engineers, explained from zero
Hiring an AI or smart contract engineer is hard when you are not one. These guides help.
What this topic covers
Hiring an engineer for AI or smart contracts is hard when you are not one yourself. The CVs all sound alike, the words are new, and a good demo tells you little about how the person will handle a real system with real users.
The articles here give you tools you can reuse. A scorecard lists what to check in an interview and what a good answer sounds like. A project brief tells a candidate exactly what you need, so you get offers you can compare, and for smart contracts it prepares the code for an outside security review from day one. The goal is simple: judge the work, not the buzzwords.
They are written for founders, managers and recruiters, not only for engineers. Every article opens with a 30-second answer and a few words to know. If you want to see what "ready for production" means before you hire, the Start here path links one article about how a release gets tested.
Start here: three episodes, in order
- Read 1Hiring an AI Engineer: How to Look Past the DemoGet a scorecard for interviewing an AI engineer.2 stages · 12 min
- Read 2Hiring a Solidity Developer: The Brief to Write FirstGet a brief that prepares smart-contract work for an audit.2 stages · 12 min
- Read 3Testing an AI Agent Before Launch: Go, Wait or BlockSee what "ready for production" means for an AI system.3 stages · 16 min
All articles on this topic
Hiring a Solidity Developer: The Brief to Write First
What to write before you ask a Solidity developer for a quote: the assets, who can act on them, who can upgrade the code, and which role you are really missing.