From IC Software Engineer to AI Engineering Manager
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Topic: From IC Software Engineer to AI Engineering Manager
Presenter: Julia Yan
Additional Resources:
From Software Engineer to AI Engineering Manager
Join Us on Wechat
A little bit about Julia
UC Davis
Joined quora after graduation
Creator related projects
Home feed
Engineering manager of Home team
POE from last year
Transition to manager
Cooperated with a strong manager
Delayed L3->L4 promotion
Flux in the team, but I stayed longest in the team
Was experienced in the team
Owned a lot of projects
Quora emphases ownership
DRI (direct responsible individual)
I am the owner for bug assignment
Bug hunting event
Brought down the bug
Leadership
Company bug DRI
PM and CEO
A new manager joined and left
I was promoted
Opportunities for working on AI
POE started in 9/2022
Had the opportunity to work on POE and is managing POE core team
LLM trends
Exponential growth
Increasing model diversity/quality
Increasing market size
Competitors
1st party model products:
chatGPT, claude.ai/anthropic, bard/gemini
ChatGPT MAU - 180M
Vertical focused
perplexity (search + AI)
character.ai: 20M
Multimedia models
Stability.ai (StableDiffusion)
Mid-Jouney
Pika lab
Aggregators:
POE, connected to multiple models
POE demo
Can connect to different models
Can create bot using base models. Can support RAG (retrieval augmented generation)
Server bot
Hackathon to create bot
A new feature:
@ another bot
Multiple bot can join the same the same chat
Developer can monetize from POE
How to get into AI/ML if I am a general SWE
Using it more
Building app
Building abstraction - an API across multiple models
Join a company
Hiring for POE
Quora
Remote first
US, canada
Pacific time 9am-3pm
13 countries
Work from home
100 engineers
ML, infra + platform
~40 working on POE
POE 5 teams
Core product
Creators
Growth
Monetization
Platform
2024
Funding 75M from A16Z
Strong growth
Candidate minimum requirements
Interview Process
Recruiter screen
Info chat
Technical phone screen
Onsite
Q&A
Profitability
2B should be major income
2C small portion
Why Quora
Interviewer and teams
Manager
Chance - is important
Be ready
Temporary manager - there was a goal to promote someone to a manager
Covid attrition
Layoff - lots of people left in 1st and 2nd layoffs
Now there is a lot of growth
Model provider: will need to train model, and limited to their own model
Aggregator - more flexible to use model
Students choosing CS major
AI is a good direction
Favorite about Quora?
Built my confidence
POE: sprint planning
Freedom to choose direction
Core product
Hackathon
Student finding full time job
Now is a good time to build a start-up
Big companies are not as open to hiring
Can do some volunteering work
How to find problems? What are their requirements?
Join some hackathons
Talk to attendees
3-4 month gap
poe twitter
Biggest challenge from IC to manager?
Transition period is not very comfortable due to becoming manager of peers
When you are a manager, will you be more distant from technology?
I continue to work on code.
I have to solve problems, not just complain.
POE twitter
AGI House - hackathon organizer with other SF companies