What Does an AI Engineer Do Now? - Aparna Dhinakaran, Arize AI

Aparna Dhinakaran of Arize AI revisits what an AI engineer actually does as the field moves from writing features to running factories of agents. The job now is building the loop: evals that review non-deterministic work, telemetry that agents consume, and agents that act on it. She walks through how Arize built Signal, an always-on agent that reads traces, remembers past issues and opens PRs, covering triggers, sandboxes, durable state, and evaluating the evaluators. Chapters 00:00 Intro: what does an AI engineer do? 00:38 Karpathy's funnel: who's running thousands of agents 01:45 Rising abst