Portland AI Engineers

4.8•141 ratings

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

See all

2026 April Meetup : Antfly
Wed, Apr 22 · 5:00 PM PDT
Multnomah County Library Albina Branch, 205 NE Russell St, Portland, OR, US
=== RSVP on Luma ====

AJ Roetker spent over a decade in Portland building distributed systems at Puppet, Lytics, and Contentstack, working on everything from storage engines and enterprise deployment tooling to cloud-native data pipelines.

Now AJ is building Antfly, a distributed multimodal database that combines full-text and vector search with built-in ML inference via Termite, our local model server for embedding, reranking, chunking, OCR, NER, transcription, and more.

This talk covers what AJ's learned building a context layer for AI agents: why retrieval needs to go beyond simple vector lookup, how a database that understands its own data changes what agents can do, and the practical challenges of making enterprise knowledge truly available to AI. Not just stored, but searchable, enriched, and ready to act and iterate on.

Schedule:
- 5:00 - 5:30: Snacks and networking
- 5:30 - 6:30: Demos start
- 6:30 - 7:00: Wrap up and networking
***

###

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 ====
58 attendees
Let's Build with A.I.
Thu, May 7 · 1:00 PM PDT
Location not specified yet
Ready to build something with AI - or help others do the same?

== RSVP HERE ==

---
This is a Collab with "The Hub" (Metro Region Innovation Hub), Us, and AI Portland

Join us for a relaxed, co-working style session where you'll have three hours to explore AI building with other curious creators. This isn't a structured workshop - it's a supportive space where you can experiment, tinker, and see what happens when you start playing with AI tools.

We'll have experienced AI builders in the room ready to answer questions, troubleshoot challenges, and share insights as you work. Whether you're taking your first steps or diving into a complex project, you'll have access to people who can help.

More details and == RSVP HERE ==
5 attendees