About

I am Ritesh Vajariya, founder and CEO of AI Guru, an AI venture studio in New York. I have spent over twenty-five years as a software engineer and engineering leader at Citi, Bloomberg, AWS and Cerebras, and I have run well over a thousand engineering interviews.

That last number is where most of this comes from.

Where the frameworks come from

Interviewing at that volume gives you an unusual sample. You watch the same career shift arrive for hundreds of people at different stages, and you hear them describe it in their own words before anyone has given them vocabulary for it. You also find out, repeatedly, which kinds of competence survive contact with a hard question and which kinds do not.

Then you go back to your own team and watch the same thing from the inside, where you cannot be objective about it and have to make the calls anyway.

The frameworks on this site are not research findings. They are patterns from that sample, sharpened by being wrong about them in front of people whose careers were affected.

Why a novel and not a manual

Because I do not think the useful part transfers as a list. The engineers I have watched navigate this well did not know more practices than the ones who struggled. They made different calls under pressure, and the difference was usually a judgment they could not fully articulate until afterward.

A story can carry that. A bulleted list cannot, and I have watched a lot of people read the bulleted list and change nothing.

What this site is

The ten frameworks from the book, written for reference rather than for reading in order, free and permanent. If they are useful, the book is where each one is earned.

Nothing is sold here except the book. There is no course on this domain, no cohort, no certification.

I also write The Forward View, a weekly newsletter on the long arc of AI, read by more than 4,000 people who actually have to decide.

Contact

hello@theainativeengineer.com · linkedin.com/in/vajariya

I read everything. I answer most things, slowly.