swyx: data engineers beat AI engineers, and he's hiring them now
swyx · x · 2026-10-19
swyx, founder of Latent.Space, argues that "data engineers > AI engineers" — people who build data-intensive applications differ fundamentally from "RAG guys," and the demand gap is the starkest of his career. The attached screenshot shows a personal blog featuring a single-machine object store with sub-ms reads and 15 GB/s uploads, a vector DB serving 1B embeddings from one machine, replacing 3TB-RAM HNSW with 40x cheaper DiskANN, a from-scratch search engine over 3B neural embeddings, and analysis of 40M HN posts. He's recruiting such engineers (SF preferred, visas OK) at [email protected].
Related event: swyx: Data Engineers Are More in Demand Than AI Engineers(2 posts)→
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