yesterday at 10pm i was deep in conversation with a founder running an ai startup. eight hours of calls behind me. dozens of founders interviewed. everyone working on either neural nets, vision transformers, token optimization, rag systems, integrations for enterprise. but when i asked what proof of value means for developers in ai, the no one had a clear answer. they said and i quote “if you get an answer to that, please share.”

proof of value used to be simple. you solved a business problem. shipped features. scaled systems. clear metrics. but ai scrambled everything. now founders look for weird signals. have you built an mcp server? touched agent architectures? worked with acps? they're checking if you're up to date, not if you're good.

the number of companies hiring

for ai in india is still evolving. most are early stage. the ones that exist care more about freshness than experience. four year old ai work? irrelevant. two year old work? ancient. this makes showing proof of value nearly impossible. but there's good news.

what all will we cover?


first, org structure

every technology shift reshapes how companies organize. understanding how ai companies are setup tells you where opportunities live.

second, your fitment frontend or backend, your path differs. we'll decode the core business problems companies actually face.

from there, learning ai foundations and skills that matter. for fe vs be vs devops engineers.

finally, the meat: picking projects that demonstrate real value

1/ macro context (org structure)


whenever a new technology shift comes,

it always reflects in the way a team or the org is set up to deploy the technology. let's go way back to the industrial revolution to then, let's say, a tata was set up back in the day for a steel company. to the next revolution around computers. the way an ibm or an apple hardware division was set up. and then the internet came. to deploy internet based products fast we got fe, be and devops.

you cannot take an internet based company's structure and go and deploy like, you know, hardware. that setup won't work. and now with ai that’s changing.

ai org structures are nuanced. i spent hours mapping job postings from openai, cursor, lovable, bolt, replit and more. this is my understanding after researching across hundreds of ai companies, looking at their job descriptions, whether it's foundational companies like openai, anthropic, deepmind. or it’s application layer ones like cursor, lovable, bolt, & replit. let’s dive in.

product engineering

frontend


you’ll build every surface a user touches. think chat, voice, and multimodal token streams. you’ll craft prompt editors, playgrounds, and in browser eval toggles, all held to a sub 300 ms p95 latency budget. the role is billed as senior frontend engineer or full stack core product engineer.

model services

backend


all code that talks to checkpoints. retrieval and vector db orchestration. agent runtimes, tool calling, control plane for model rollouts. developer tooling and experiment harness. an example listing is an ai applied engineer focused on reliability at lovable.

platform

infrastructure


autoscaling, spot instance bidding, cache layers. observability stacks for token cost and latency. (mostly seen in larger ai companies)