How a Career Shift Led to a Senior AI Role

A Bold Career Move

A tech professional from San Francisco recently made a bold career move that led to a senior AI position at a major tech company. This journey began with a desire to explore the creator economy and ended with a successful return to AI development.

Early Career and Passion for Creators

The individual started working at a well-known tech giant in 2018, focusing on augmented reality and education technology. Alongside this, they hosted a podcast aimed at helping creators grow their businesses. This passion led them to join a creator commerce platform in early 2023.

Developing Creator Studio

At the new company, the goal was to develop an AI tool to help creators repurpose their content. The tool, called Creator Studio, could turn:

• Podcast transcripts into blog posts
• Long videos into short clips for social media

This project required learning on the job, as the individual had not previously built an AI product.

Key Challenges and Solutions

One of the key challenges was figuring out how to engineer different prompts for various types of content. For example:

• Generating a blog post required different prompts than a LinkedIn post.
• The team built internal tools to test and compare these prompts quickly.
• The individual used their own podcast episodes as testing material to refine the tool's output.

Return to Tech Giant

After launching Creator Studio in March 2024, the individual saw an opportunity to return to the tech giant, this time focusing on generative AI for visual content. They were drawn to this role because they believed it was an area where the industry was still figuring things out. This could give them a competitive edge in the future.

The Value of Practical Experience

The individual's experience building an AI product from scratch at the creator commerce platform was a significant factor in landing the senior AI role. They could demonstrate their ability to:

• Identify business problems
• Explore solutions
• Learn from failures

This practical experience was more valuable than just having impressive grades or credentials.

Advice for Aspiring AI Professionals

For those looking to break into AI, the advice is to:

• Start small
• Test out AI agents to solve real problems in your daily life, like booking flights
• If your company isn't focused on AI, consider pitching a project to gain experience