AI. It’s everything now. If you don’t have an AI team then you don’t have anything. I am just kidding :). But if you look at the media, that’s what it feels like.
Anyway, you have decided to start an AI team what talents do you look for? I have interacted with more than 20 AI startups and AI teams and the following are my observations and how I would put up a job posting.
Given that the vast majority of AI problems fall under some sort of pattern matching, find candidates who are good at identifying patterns. For your interviews, just print out some patterns in images and text(will share some in a later post) and ask the candidates to find the patterns.
Deep neural networks work in hyper dimensional space. So the candidate must be good in geometry. She should be able to wrap her head around multi dimensional spaces. She should be able to visualize the space and features.
The candidate should have a solid math and statistics foundation. I would in fact prefer math graduates and students from institutes like Indian Statistical Institute.
Python especially numpy experience is preferable. Should be comfortable with playing around with matrices.
Finally, experience in libraries and tools like TensorFlow, Pytorch etc. This does not matter much. This would be the last thing I would look for. The thing is, most ML programs are not more 100 lines of code and learning these tools wont take more than a week for most.
So in a nutshell, since the tools and APIs are well defined for ML at the higher layers, I would concentrate on getting candidates who have good math fundamentals and then train them on the tools.
