The Arjay McCandless Show

Arjay McCandless
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Conversations with software engineers, founders, and builders about how great software actually gets made.

Episodes

  1. 5 days ago

    Becoming an AI Engineer in 2026: Interviewing, System Design, Evals | Aishwarya Reganti

    Aishwarya Reganti joins me to break down how to become an AI engineer in 2026, including the skills software engineers should learn, how AI engineering interviews are changing, and what companies actually look for when hiring. We cover system design, evals, context engineering, AI agents, production reliability, AI product sense, and why judgment matters more than simply generating code with AI. If you’re a software engineer looking to break into AI engineering, this is for you. Aishwarya's GitHub: https://github.com/aishwaryanr/awesome-generative-ai-guide Aishwarya's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/areganti/ Learn from Aishwarya directly on Maven: https://maven.com/aishwarya-kiriti/genai-system-design 0:00 Intro 2:21 What is AI Engineering? 7:51 Evals 15:05 Interviewing for AI Eng and FDE roles 18:58 AI Product Sense 23:01 Enterprise AI Use Cases & Context Engineering 32:19 When to Use AI and Why AI Systems Fail in Production 42:08 Multi-Agent Systems and Coding Agent Workflows 48:26 Breaking into AI Eng as a SWE

  2. 17 Jul

    Getting your first promotion as a SWE: Brandon Nguyen

    Brandon & Arjay go into tactical details on exactly what it takes to land your first and second promotions as a software engineer in big tech

  3. 3 Jul

    Venmo’s First Engineer on Startups, AI, and Selling to Google: Shreyans Bhansali

    Shreyans Bhansali was the first engineer at Venmo, the founder of Socratic, and later joined Google when Socratic was acquired, then was a co-founder of Maven. In this episode, we talk about what Venmo was actually like in the early days, we get into the story behind Socratic, how the Google acquisition happened, and what changed after moving from a startup into Big Tech. Later, we talk about AI, software engineering, and why Shreyans thinks the current AI moment feels similar to the early 2010s startup wave: obvious in hindsight, but still full of unsolved problems.

  4. 20 Jun

    Jeff Escalante - Director of Software at Clerk

    This is a conversation with Jeff Escalante, who’s currently a Director of Engineering at Clerk, where he spends more than 80% of his time writing code. Before that, Jeff was an early engineer at HashiCorp, where he joined around 200 employees and stayed through the company growing to thousands of employees and eventually IPOing. During that time, he also became a prominent contributor to Next.js, which led him to join Vercel as the manager of the Next.js team, where he helped shape the roadmap for one of the most important frameworks in web development. In this episode, we talk about how Jeff broke into software engineering without a traditional CS background, how to get hired without spraying your résumé everywhere, what he’s learned from spending most of his career in dev tools, how Clerk thinks about engineering, and how AI is changing the way software engineering actually works. Hope you enjoy the first episode, and welcome to the podcast.

  • 4 Episodes

About

Conversations with software engineers, founders, and builders about how great software actually gets made.

Information

  • Creator
    Arjay McCandless
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    4
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Arjay McCandless
  • Show Website
    The Arjay McCandless Show
  • Provider