AI-First Organization / Session 08 / Hiring & AI Engineering Talent
The AI-First Developer: What the Job Became and How to Hire for It
About this session
In this session: Every job post says AI-first. Almost nobody can define it. Kay Malcolm, who leads AI Database product management at Oracle, joins Gauntlet AI COO Brett Johnson to explain what the developer job has become: specifying, directing, and verifying the code and agents that write it, then shipping it on real data. They’ll get into where teams stall in production, which interview signals separate engineers who ship from engineers who demo, and what training can and can’t fix. You’ll leave with a working definition of the AI-first developer and a clear frame for deciding when to hire new talent and when to retrain the team you already have.
This is for CTOs, VPs of Engineering, engineering managers, and technical talent leaders hiring or upskilling AI engineers.
In this session
- A working definition of the AI-first developer: the shift from writing code to directing, verifying, and shipping AI-built systems on real data, and why that’s a different skill set, not a tool preference.
- The tells that separate engineers who ship production AI from engineers who demo it, and which interview signals actually predict it.
- A decision frame for when to hire new AI-first engineers and when to retrain the team you already have.
About the speakers
Kay Malcolm, Guest. Kay Malcolm is Vice President of AI Database Product Management at Oracle and a 2026 LinkedIn Top Voice for AI. She built Oracle LiveLabs, now serving more than 50 million views, and writes AI For You, a newsletter that translates enterprise AI into plain English for professionals whose careers depend on it. Connect with Speaker
Brett Johnson, Host. Brett Johnson is COO of Gauntlet AI, where he owns the P&L and runs the marketplace connecting AI-first engineers with 110+ hiring partners, from pre-seed startups to public companies. Before Gauntlet AI, he spent a decade leading in enterprise sales.