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Hiring & Building an AI Engineering Team: Dr. Bryan Bischof
Takeaway
Hire AI engineers as senior product-minded SWEs comfortable in Python and TypeScript who can ship to real users, not ML researchers chasing publications.
Summary
- Bryan Bischof (Hex, 12 years in DS/ML) credits his own 2023 tweet as an inspiration for the 'AI Engineer' role and shares how he wrote Hex's first AI engineer job posting.
- Explicitly does NOT want ML researchers chasing ICLR papers — wants senior engineers who have shipped ML to production and care about business impact.
- Requires comfort with both Python and TypeScript since Hex's app is TS; one strong, one open-to-learn is acceptable.
- Staffing recipe shifts by stage: early needs SWE + data + product; mid-stage adds infra and design (design being the most-missed hire he sees).
hiringai-engineerteam-building
Original description
Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025 About Dr. Bryan Bryan Bischof is the Head of AI at Hex, where he leads the team of engineers building Magic—the data science and analytics copilot. Bryan has worked all over the data stack leading teams in analytics, machine learning engineering, data platform engineering, and AI engineering. He started the data team at Blue Bottle Coffee, led several projects at Stitch Fix, and built the data teams at Weights and Biases. Bryan previously co-authored the book Building Production Recommendation Systems with O’Reilly, and teaches Data Science and Analytics in the graduate school at Rutgers. His Ph.D. is in pure mathematics.