• Strong Programming Fundamentals: Proficient in Python (required) and comfortable with TypeScript or Go. Familiarity with modern AI/ML libraries like PyTorch, Hugging Face transformers, and datasets.
• Hands-On AI/LLM Experience: Proven project experience (via GitHub, research, or prior internships) building applications with LLMs, vector search, or custom embeddings.
• Systems & Data Engineering Mindset: Understanding of modern API design (REST/gRPC), asynchronous execution, and standard database infrastructure (SQL, NoSQL, Vector DBs).
• Analytical Approach: Demonstrated ability to systematically debug model performance issues, clean messy text datasets, and evaluate output quality programmatically.