Top 1%

AI Engineer

Ships agents, evaluations and production LLM systems that survive contact with real users.

Forward deployed

Agents and automation

Infrastructure and MLOps

Who picks this

Is this you?

You can already code, or you are close, and you want the work that pays for building with models rather than talking about them.

The deepest and best-paid of the four, and the one with the most open roles.

The standard

This is the list your passport is scored against. Heaviest first — the things that actually change a hiring decision are at the top.

Project
An agent running in production
Something with a live URL that other people use. Tool calls, error handling and a reason it does not fall over.
Project
An evaluation suite you wrote
The single clearest signal that you have shipped, not prototyped. Cases, a scoring method, and a number that moved.
Credential
AI Engineering certification
Assessed, dated and verifiable — not a completion badge.
Signal
A GitHub anyone can read
Two or three repositories with real commit history and a README that says what the thing does.
Story
A cost or latency story
You made something meaningfully cheaper or faster, and you can say by how much. Nearly every interview asks.
Experience
Work alongside other engineers
Code review, a shared codebase, shipping to a deadline someone else set.

Your passport tracks every line, tells you which are missing, and gives you one action for each.

How you close the gaps

You take these because something on your passport is missing — not because a platform sold you a course.

Ten minutes with Tai and you will have this list scored against your own work, with the gaps ranked and a first action on each.