The engineering profiles that are hardest to find right now.
AI engineering, security, and data: three profiles in short supply.
Why these three
AI concentrated the demand for engineers.
Companies hire fewer people than they did two years ago, and the people they do hire are harder to find and more costly to get wrong. These three profiles are where that shows up first.
AI engineering
Engineers who take LLMs and agents from prototype to production. They design retrieval pipelines, orchestrate multi-step agents with tool calling, and build the evaluation and observability that keep outputs reliable after launch. They have shipped these systems before and know how they fail in production.
What they own: integration into real systems · evaluation and guardrails · turning a prototype into something the business can depend on.
Security
Engineers who secure AI systems with the same rigor as any production software. Every model that touches your data adds exposure, and most teams add AI capabilities faster than they review them.
What they own: access and data governance around AI systems · review of what each new capability exposes · the controls you need before you approve AI adoption.
Data
Engineers who build the data foundation every model depends on. Many AI projects stall because the data underneath them can’t be trusted, so this work comes first.
What they own: pipelines, data quality, and lineage · the data layer every other system relies on.
Questions to ask a partner
How to check that a partner can really find these profiles
Where have they placed this exact profile, and when?
Ask for the specific role, stack, and month they filled it.
How many candidates did they review to get there?
A partner that reaches scarce profiles knows its own numbers.
What happens if the person doesn’t work out?
Ask who covers that cost.
Who assessed them technically, and how?
If the answer is a coding test, ask what the test didn’t show.
We answer these four questions in writing, and any partner you’re considering should do the same.
Tell us which profile you need
Tell us which of the three profiles you need and what the person will work on. We’ll reply with how scarce that profile is right now and a realistic timeline.
Tell us which profile you need
Looking for a specific technology or role?
Send us the stack and the seniority you need. We’ll confirm whether we can find that profile.
Talk to us about a position
