Just a bit of a warning for you all.

We hired a new AWS engineer, lets call him Johnny, who was supposed to join our team today. He did hop on the teams chat for the morning standup to introduce himself, and reception was pretty choppy. After our entire team introed ourselves, he said that he'll be working from out of state for the next couple of month until his kids graduates and then he'll be moving to assume a full time on-prem position.

Later today I get an invite to a mandatory meeting. Apparently, Johnny was not Johnny but a person from North Korea with stolen identity. He passed all background checks and everything else, but used non-existing shipping address to get his work laptop shipped to. The real Johnny actually working for Microsoft, when he was contacted he said that he's been bombarded with positions for the past month or so, but not planning to switch jobs.

So, watch out, if you aren't job hunting and start getting invites from recruiters, maybe its something fishy.

Not sure if others are experiencing this recently but I was getting a couple of callbacks for interviews at the end of 2025 and all the way up till Q1 of this year. Since Q1, it’s become dead quiet and I’ve had literally 0 callbacks. I’m applying with referrals and still zero callbacks.

Is anyone else experiencing the same? I have 3 YoE so I know the market is not in favor for me whatsoever, but the sudden drop in callbacks is concerning me.

I’m also applying daily with jobs posted within the last 24 hours, am I doing something wrong or is this a market sucks situation?

I’ve recently seen a lot of resumes on Reddit where job seekers describe themselves as AI engineers, and I’m curious what that actually means.

Some of my friends in AI work on things like model training, hyperparameter tuning, loss function design, model deployment, and GPU inference optimization.

My own area is AI + rendering, mainly neural rendering. I use AI to approximate radiance, visibility, light transport, indirect lighting, material response, and similar rendering-related components.

That’s why I’m confused by the current use of the title “AI engineer.” A lot of resumes I see look more like backend engineering resumes. If someone is just building a RAG app, calling an API to make an AI agent, or putting together a chatbot, isn’t that something almost anyone can do at this point? Even people without a CS background can build that. So what is the actual engineering value there?