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 Aug Meetup
Multnomah County Library Albina Branch, 205 NE Russell St, Portland, OR, US=== RSVP on Luma ====
Title: Foundational AI Tooling for the ASF
Speaker: Andrew Musselman, AI Platform Engineer, ASF Tooling (https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmusselman)
Abstract: Apache projects are adopting AI the way the rest of the world is: quickly, unevenly, and with everyone wiring up their own accounts, keys, and budgets. That works for one project but falls apart at Apache scale. This talk describes what Apache Tooling is building to replace that with a single, governed, self-serve layer, shows what is already in use, and indicates what to build next.
The platform has four parts, each mapping to a real need: agents (Gofannon) so subject-matter experts build their own tools without standing up infrastructure; an LLM gateway (llmao) so projects share governed model access instead of personal keys; MCP tool federation so those agents reach real systems safely; and an advisor layer so the Foundation can see and steer cost, quality, and routing.
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 ====
47 attendees
Past events
17
