What we’re about
Portland AI Engineers is a community of software developers at all experience levels exploring the frontiers of generative AI through hands-on experimentation. We're builders who leverage cutting-edge models—from frontier APIs to on-device, LLMs to multimodal—to create practical applications ranging from personal hobby projects to enterprise-scale solutions. Join us to share discoveries, compare approaches, and push the boundaries of what's possible in this rapidly evolving field.
What is an AI Engineer? An AI Engineer is a software developer who integrates existing language model capabilities into products that solve real-world problems. We are not pre-training models or delving deep into data science—we're focused on applying our foundational software development skills to harness generative AI and its surrounding tools ecosystem to build scalable, user-centric applications.
"In numbers, there's probably going to be significantly more AI Engineers than there are ML engineers / LLM engineers. One can be quite successful in this role without ever training anything."
— Andrej Karpathy, Formerly OpenAI, Tesla
Sponsors
Upcoming events
1
Portland AI Engineers November Meeting
Multnomah County Library Albina Branch, 205 NE Russell St, Portland, OR, USThis month we will have in depth technical presentations from AI builders looking for feedback and diverse perspectives our amazing community can always be counted on for.
Schedule:
- 5:00 - 5:30: Snacks and networking
- 5:30 - 6:30: Presentations
- 6:30 - 7:00: Wrap up and networking
====== Presenters =======
Elena Korotkina: Building agentic workflows without AI frameworks.
Summary: Agentic AI frameworks promise batteries-included orchestration, with tools, memory, routing, and retries. These can be great for many use cases, but they also introduce a real learning curve and black-box execution paths. In this session we'll talk about building agentic workflows from scratch in Node.js using OpenAI functions API. We'll see how this lightweight, transparent approach can embed AI decision-making inside your existing codebase, free from framework opacity, and easy to debug and maintain.
Bio: Elena is a senior full-stack developer with experience ranging from startups to large enterprises. She is the founder of SignalMind, one of the first responsive website builder platforms. Recently Elena has focused on AI-driven solutions and mobile app development, combining technical knowledge with a passion for building intuitive, impactful solutions.---
Sam Keen
Summary: The fundamentals of memory in agentic systems. In this presentation, Sam will start with defining the problem memory solves for LLM based agentic systems. We will then look behind the curtain to examine an example of implementing memory in a pragmatic manner. From there we will discover how this enhances the system overall and see how an LLM, with few guardrails, leverages this new capability.
Bio: Author of Clean Architecture with Python. I've spent over 25 years building software. From startups to Nike, Lululemon, and AWS. Now I focus full-time on understanding how AI reshapes our work.---
Daniel Dimik
More details to follow but at a high level expect a presentation regarding the utilization of Small Language models in a Mixture of Expert paradigm.***
###
Get involved:
- Present your work at a future event: Email us at info@portlandai.engineer to discuss sharing your project or insights
- Provide feedback: Help shape our community by sharing your ideas and suggestions
- Sponsor an event: Contact us to discuss partnership opportunities
For more information and to join our community, visit portlandai.engineer
Thank you to our amazing sponsors
Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE)
Silicon Florist
AlteredCraft
O'Reilly
Instrument65 attendees
Past events
7
Group links
Organizers
Sponsors