Empowering the Global AI Engineering Community
We produce the world's highest-signal technical AI conferences, serving over a million AI engineers, founders of breakout AI startups, and AI architects at the world's largest technology companies.
AI Engineer (operated by Software 3.0 Inc) was born from a simple observation: the rise of foundation models created an entirely new kind of engineer. In June 2023, Shawn "swyx" Wang published "The Rise of the AI Engineer" on Latent Space, arguing that a wide range of AI tasks that used to take five years and a research team could now be accomplished with API docs and a spare afternoon. The essay went viral — even Andrej Karpathy agreed.
Together with veteran conference organizer Ben Dunphy (founder of Reactathon and JAMstack Conf), swyx launched the first AI Engineer Summit in October 2023. It sold out instantly with a 10:1 applicant ratio. By June 2024, the AI Engineer World's Fair drew 3,000+ attendees to San Francisco, making it the largest technical AI conference for engineers in the world.
Today, AI Engineer produces flagship conferences on four continents — from San Francisco to London to New York — alongside independently organized partner events in Paris, Miami, Singapore, Melbourne, and beyond. All top talks are released for free on YouTube for the world to benefit.
Our Mission
To empower and unite the global AI engineering community by delivering transformative events, knowledge exchange, and collaborative experiences that accelerate practical AI progress.
Our Journey
The Rise of the AI Engineer
World's Fair Debut
Going Global
A Worldwide Movement
Our conferences attract the best minds in AI engineering
AI Engineers & Developers
Software engineers building with LLMs, agents, RAG, and AI APIs. From individual contributors shipping AI features to principal engineers designing AI systems at scale.
Founders & Technical Leaders
Founders of breakout AI startups, VPs of AI, CTOs, and Heads of Engineering at companies from seed-stage to Fortune 500. People making build-vs-buy decisions daily.
AI Researchers & Scientists
Applied ML researchers, research engineers, and scientists from top labs and universities bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and production engineering.
Enterprise AI Architects
Senior technical leaders at enterprises with 1,000+ employees navigating org design, model strategy, FMOps, evals, inference optimization, and AI transformation.
Past Speakers From
Shawn "swyx" Wang
Cofounder & CEO
Shawn "swyx" Wang is the cofounder and CEO of AI Engineer, writer and podcast host at Latent Space, and contributes to building world-class evaluation standards for coding agents at Cognition. After beginning his career in quantitative finance, he went on to lead Developer Relations at AWS and at three devtools unicorn startups — Netlify, Temporal, and Airbyte. He is best known for his work on the Rise of the AI Engineer at Latent Space, and for popularizing the concepts of the Self-Provisioning Runtime, the Third Age of JS, and the End of Localhost on DX.Tips. He shares his work and ideas on Twitter, GitHub, and YouTube.
Lia McBride
General Manager
Lia McBride is the General Manager of AI Engineer, where she leads the business globally across strategy, commercial growth, operations, partnerships and international expansion.
Lia joined AI Engineer in July 2023, just three months after its founding, to advise and consult for the founders ahead of the company’s first event that October. As one of only three people building AI Engineer in its first year, she helped shape its foundations and operating model from the start. After two years of driving the company’s growth, she was asked by co-founder swyx to take over leadership of the business. AI Engineer has now become the home of one of the fastest-growing AI engineering communities in the world.
Lia brings nearly two decades of experience in technology, including early-career work with Google, and senior leadership roles at Twitter and Improbable. Throughout, she has focused on advancing developer ecosystems, scaling high-growth platforms and building the structures that let innovation thrive. At AI Engineer, she continues to expand the company’s global footprint, delivering high-impact experiences that grow the industry and support the next generation of applied AI.
From essay to community
AI Engineer grew from the foundation-model-era framing that Shawn "swyx" Wang popularized in his 2023 Latent Space essay. The organization and conference series were created to give the builders applying these models to real products a place to learn from one another.
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