I've spent fourteen years inside product teams, the last five at Atom Learning, where I owned the design system the rest of engineering built on, mentored the people using it, tech-led delivery and interviewed the engineers we hired.
Alongside that I've shipped seven products of my own, three of them AI products: Rankahead.ai, Recly.io and Decklab AI. Some with cofounders, all of them end to end: design, frontend, backend, infrastructure, billing and the support inbox.
That is where the AI work stopped being a demo. Owning the model bill, the latency and the support inbox at once teaches you quickly which prompts are load-bearing, what a model does to inputs you never imagined, and how much of an AI product is really the plumbing around the model: the retrieval, the schemas, the retries, the queue behind it all.
It's the combination I'd like to be hired for. I can own an AI product end to end, model layer included, and I would much rather do it with a team than around one.