About us
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
Upcoming events
1
2026 Sept Meetup
Location not specified yet=== RSVP on Luma ====
Presentation: A product leader, not an engineer, built a live margin system for a Direct-to-Consumer brand that lacked visibility into the true per-order profit after discounts, shipping, third-party logistics, and ad spend. This talk walks through the build end-to-end: defining the problem in Claude Cowork with the stakeholder, developing in Claude Code through a GitHub repo that auto-deploys to a VPS, front-end in Claude Design, and n8n running the data pipeline in production. The honest throughline: how far one product person can carry a real system, and where the limits are.
Bio: Craig Calder brings 20 years of senior product management leadership, from startups to eBay and New Relic. He now runs an AI implementation practice for product leadership and works hands-on with the production AI stack: LLMs, agentic systems, and knowledge graphs.
Schedule:
- 5:00 - 5:30: Snacks and networking
- 5:30 - 6:30: Demos start
- 6:30 - 7:00: Wrap up and networking
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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
the VIC=== RSVP HERE ====
3 attendees
Past events
18
