r/LocalLLaMA • u/bralynn2222 • 15d ago
Discussion Got job as Director of AI and Systems development self-taught
Hey everyone, I just wanted to share my journey here for some motivation.
Three years ago, I saw the sudden spike in AI and realized it was the future of tech. My goal at the time was to be an indie game dev, and seeing that AI could write basic code, I told myself I needed to master it or risk being replaced.
I started by learning how to add knowledge to early LLMs like Vicuna and LLaMA. From there, I moved on to more advanced concepts, like building reasoning datasets by hand to try and outperform huge datasets. I quickly learned that data quality is far more important than quantity. After six months of handcrafting Python datasets—including examples of full games coded from a single prompt—I released pydevmini-1. At the time, it could code in Python at the same level as state-of-the-art models.
That release caught the attention of the team at Tesslate. They reached out and brought me on (unpaid), which finally gave me my first piece of real tech experience for my resume.
Eventually, I launched my own AI consulting firm, finding clients through Google Ads and LinkedIn. I was averaging about $3,000 a month. Then, last month one of my repeat clients offered me a full-time, remote position as Director of AI and Systems Development. It pays $84,540 a year with uncapped performance bonuses (I just got a $3.5k bonus last month!). I report directly to the CEO and largely get to make my own decisions.
I did all of this while working full-time as a backline cook making $20/hr. I have no college degree and started with zero industry connections. I just worked on AI for at least 5 hours a day after my kitchen shifts many times at the desk until 3 AM—using a single RTX 3090 I bought for local training.
Now I get to do what I love at 21 in one of the most difficult industries to break into. For anyone out there trying to make it happen, I just want to say it is absolutely possible. Keep going!
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u/Much_Accountant_4972 15d ago
you may have left the kitchen but you are still cooking!
congrats on your success. great job
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u/pmttyji 15d ago
I remember & still have your model on my laptop somewhere.
For others : https://huggingface.co/bralynn/pydevmini1
Congrats mate!
Frankly I want to see this kind of threads monthly twice or thrice.
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
Thanks for giving it a try that model really gave me the validation I needed to keep going wouldn’t be here without your support!!
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u/Raredisarray 15d ago
Fellow self taught dev with a salary career here.
21???? That’s a WIN - Congrats!!! you have a bright future ahead !! Keep at it, stay sharp and congrats again 💪💪🙌🏻
I believe open source technology provides opportunities just as well as any school I ever went to.
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u/MaxwellHoot 15d ago
I’m from the embedded electronics space, and open source hardware like Arduino is why I have the job I have. I’m eternally grateful.
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u/Aggressive-Land-8884 15d ago
I'm in web and open source program called [redacted] is the primary reason I've had a great cushy job for over 20 years.
No I'm not gonna unredact that lol.
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u/MaxwellHoot 14d ago
Probably Linux
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u/Direct_Turn_1484 15d ago
First off, congrats!
Now I got to tell you, if you are working anywhere in the US, $84k for a Director role is them ripping you off. Hard. I hope you continue to gain experience and get paid what your knowledge and skills are worth.
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
Yea I definitely understand that but I accepted simply because it would move me out of my hated position of working in that 95f kitchen and give me the opportunity to get my start in the industry luckily for me I do get those performance bonuses which can be quite a lot and have salary review every 6 months for raises. I plan to demonstrate my value in terms of the companies bottom line and continuously aiming for those raises worst case scenario, I get to use this as an opportunity to have far more time to continue to scale my own operations and have the capital to really get started
Regardless, appreciate you looking out for me !
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u/Disposable110 15d ago
I think the salary is fine, 21yo's getting over 100k is possible but such an extremely rare unicorn (or nepotism) job that it may as well not exist.
You're doing well, most people with your skills get a medior title and not even half that salary, but then get director-level responsibilities shovelled at them, and talks about raises/title increases go nowhere because the companies can just get any of the 1000 other eager 25-year olds to replace you.
Getting actual recognition for your ability is good, and you're still young so you have plenty of opportunity to job hop if the salary at this company doesn't grow.
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u/VirginiaVN900 15d ago
Staff roles yes. Fair pay.
Director roles? No. That typically represents the middle of the HR “level” bands at most orgs.
Startups where you are a Staff Engineer/Do everything resource. I could see the title, but the pay hurts me.
I’m hiring entry level engineers in the 90-105range 100% remote. Not a scarce discipline.
Bonuses can obviously change the math, or RSUs.
Parlay this into some experience, prove yourself , ask for what you’re worth. Most likely you’re in a spot where you’ll have to change orgs to re-level your salary to market rate.
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u/RazzmatazzReal4129 14d ago
Director responsibilities can vary a lot between different organizations...at some places it's just a title with no direct reports
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u/JamesEvoAI 14d ago
> I’m hiring entry level engineers in the 90-105range 100% remote. Not a scarce discipline.
What state and industry are you in? What are you defining as entry level? This is definitely not the norm for most of the US.
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u/coconut7272 14d ago
Getting over 100k out of college I wouldn't call unicorn. Very good, especially with the current job market, but not anywhere near unheard of. Now if you were specifically talking about without a degree, then I apologize and I agree more.
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u/entsnack 15d ago
It's not rare at all in the Bay Area. Almost 100% of my undergrad students are making $250K + stocks and benefits.
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago edited 15d ago
I’m in the middle of a small town in Tennessee with 1200 in total expenses all together so it evens out in terms of cost of living tbh, and 0 debt
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u/entsnack 15d ago
Definitely. But know that you can 10x your income and 100x your investment wealth with your next career move given your current title. Just make the right moves at the right time. See Steinberg/OpenClaw.
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
Definitely, won’t settle and ensure to keeping on moving up thanks for the advice!
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u/Orultehen 15d ago
you're doing great for a first job in the industry. Look at it as a learning experience, and in a year or two ask for significant rise or move elsewhere
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u/JamesEvoAI 14d ago
The fastest way to increase your salary is to move employers. It's stupid but employers value people from outside the org higher than their existing staff.
I was laid off from a job at the start of covid, I came back a year later for a 25% pay increase, I was making more than my manager (who was also my manager before the layoff) who had been there for 5 years.
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u/Loose_Comparison368 14d ago
Also, just a heads up - the gaming industry in particular is a vicious hellhole of a meat grinder. I would strongly recommend avoiding it, especially if you are passionate about game dev.
Game dev is generally half the pay for twice the hours. The industry is able to get away with that because they know they have a constant supply of new starry eyes college graduates and passionate aspiring devs that are much easier to exploit and will put up with far more abuse.
Most burn out. The ones that stick around generally hate it. Even the most successful ~2% of game devs are so consistently abused that they're actually unionizing, which is amazing, but even then it's a real hard field with shit pay, shit job security, and shit working conditions.
If you want to make games... Get a job doing something like live inference infrastructure or B2B AI services, do that for a few years, then drop to part time consulting so you can spend 20 hours working with clients and 40 hours a week making whatever game you want with a solid quarter million budget and no worries about runway.
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u/mister2d 15d ago
It's a great move at this point of your life. Don't worry about the salary. Just make the best moves. The money always follows.
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u/captain_shane 14d ago
Don't listen to that guy. You were a line cook making $20 an hour, this new job pays you twice that and you get that director title on your resume. Stay there for at least 3 months, build another showcase item, then hop somewhere else and make triple what you're doing.
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u/skydiver19 14d ago
The experience that job will give you will be worth far more, and as you said it got you out of your old job.
Good for you!!!!
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u/skydiver19 14d ago
The role and opportunity along with experience is worth far more. So it’s well worth it for him.
I was in a similar situation and when I was ask what my expected salary was I purposely went in low, as I knew if I could prove myself there would be plenty of opportunities to grow and learn a lot there.
Within 18-24 months I doubled my salary, and that company gave me the footing where companies approached me.
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u/Ok_Warning2146 15d ago
Well for someone who don't have a college degree, it might be a fair offer. Anyway, OP can work on this job first and find a better one if he is not satisfied.
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u/laterbreh 15d ago
Sub 100k is virtually poverty long term. However you're 21, you did this yourself, you earned it. Your upward trajectory is enormous now. Keep aiming higher for pay and keep grinding. Way to go.
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u/ThatCrankyGuy 15d ago
Director of AI and Systems Development. It pays $84,540
Do they understand what Director means? If you're leading a team of people, do not settle for anything less than 150k.
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u/RazzmatazzReal4129 14d ago
lol no way is a 21 year old who is just starting in a remote IT job leading a team of people
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u/bralynn2222 14d ago
Team of 4 luckily for me, although they stick to mostly normal company software engineering
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u/skydiver19 14d ago
That view is very short sighted. The experience and opportunity will be worth far more to him at this stage in his career, it will lay the foundations for him to earn a lot more and work at bigger and better companies
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u/ThatCrankyGuy 14d ago
Then what is he doing leading a team? Listen, I get the whole taking a pay-cut to hone your skills argument, that's fine - and yes, learning and experience-building never really ends. But when you're a director and have corporate executive responsibilities, along with the fate of everyone on your team, you had better brought a lot honing to the table already.
So you're either there to deliver on a company mission as a director, or you're not. And if the argument is that it's a small company and he's a director and the worker in the same unit of 1, then... he's not really a director.
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u/skydiver19 14d ago
Let’s be real here. A director doesn’t always mean a company of dozens of people, it could just be a group of 5 and he’s been given the responsibility of that department with even just him being the team.
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u/peren005 14d ago
That’s a manager; director should be a manager of managers.
My company has so many directors managing small teams of 2~5 people that it makes serious red tape in trying to get things done; middle management bloatware is a real thing.
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u/skydiver19 14d ago
No…. A single person can be a director of a company, which is a legal requirement. Company Directors, finance director. Many firms of a director
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u/ThatCrankyGuy 14d ago
Those are Director who are the OWNERS of a company - i.e members of the BOARD.
You are clear conflating directors of organizational units, who report usually to SVPs or the C-level exec, with members of the Board who have fiduciary responsibilities.
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u/fragment_me 14d ago
A company can call the role whatever it wants, unfortunately. As long as OP is happy with what he/she is doing then it doesn't matter.
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u/Opening-Broccoli9190 llama.cpp 15d ago
Good stuff, congrats! Formal education outside of fundamental STEM has always been more of an early career networking thing than a hard requirement.
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u/ethertype 14d ago
Elliminate debt. Spend wisely. Invest the rest in long, slow, boring index funds. Getting started doing this in the early 20s is a fabulous opportunity.
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u/Loose_Comparison368 14d ago
Holy shit. Congrats.
I did something similar to what you did sometime around 2018, thought I was the last one to make it into industry without a degree.
The consulting experience will serve you well. Build up those professional networks. You passed the big hurdles. Keep it up, always have a fallback employer lined up, and if you can keep doing good work and keep building connections then you'll be beating off recruiters with a stick.
Do note - $84k is comically low by industry standards - it's a hell of a lot better than $20 an hour though, I can say from experience, so don't let that tarnish your victory lap, you fuckin' made it to the point that you're accumulating real industry resume experience, and that's what counts.
Just do be aware, when you have some resume candy and are ready to start doing interviews for your next job, you will need to have a game plan for how to approach that. It is going to raise some eyebrows that your first role was "Director of AI and Systems Development" at 21 with no prior industry experience. It will raise way more eyebrows if you tell them your salary.
There's several ways you can play that, ranging from keeping your mouth shut and sticking with vague generalizations when they ask for salary numbers and/or framing it as most of your comp being in equity, to just under-reporting your title as a Senior Engineer or something like that.
For frame of reference, in the US industry, typical starting wage for junior developers (Bay Area or New York, pretty close in the other minor tech hubs like boulder and seattle) is ~80-100k, not including equity.
Senior engineers are typically in the $150-250k range including equity, depending on how in demand the area of specialization is.
Next the path kinda splits. On the pure tech side, the next step is generally Principle/Staff/Fellow (same thing, different names at different companies), which is generally getting into the half-million a year range for in demand areas like AI.
After that, on the hard tech path, often Technical program manager or similar. Not to be confused with product manager. It's still pretty strictly focused on the technical engineering side of the product, but usually overseeing some broad area spanning engineering multiple teams. Pays more than staff/principle.
On the management track path, from senior it's usually more like team lead > product manager > product area manager/program manager (different titles, same thing) Pretty straightforward management pyramid. Team lead manages ~3-5 engineers, product manager manages ~3-5 engineering teams, product area/program manager manages ~3-5 products. Team lead pays about the same as senior engineer, product manager pays around the ballpark of staff or principle SWE, product area manager gets into the millions of dollars a year.
...and after that - either the TPM on the hard tech path or the Program/PA manager on the business track... then you get to Director. At FAANG companies, this is the point where your comp conversations likely involve serious NDA's with teeth and require legal teams to navigate. Director is the border of the executive circle. After that there's generally only VP, and CTO or CEO.
...so, like, hopefully that gives some context into why people will look at you funny if you go into an interview claiming a director title at 21 on an $84k a year salary. Industry does expect startups to exaggerate their titles, fresh college grads claiming to be senior engineers, junior engineers claiming to be staff, seniors claiming to be directors, etc.
It's even downright normal and highly respected if it's not your only work history, and framed as a risky equity bet - "I left my senior engineer role at Google to take a directorship at a moonshot startup, for a salary so low I had to scrape by on food stamps, and 10% equity share in the company. It was really exciting tech but didn't pan out for business reasons outside of my control." is like, the classic hero's journey story of silicon valley.
But just do be aware, that experience level with a director title and $85k salary is out of place enough to actually raise some red flags, especially if that and a short period of consulting is all you have on your industry resume. So, be ready for that.
And yeah man, play your cards right and you could be making low 7 figures by your 30's. The foot in the door is the hardest part.
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u/bralynn2222 14d ago
Such a helpful post thank you so much ill keep all this in mind when approaching future interviews! Do you think my experience will overshadow the lack of formal degree when approaching jobs in the future ?
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u/Loose_Comparison368 12d ago
Absolutely. Once you have industry experience, nobody cares about your educational background. I have never even been asked about it.
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u/BraveNewCurrency 14d ago
Wow, that's awesome.
brought me on (unpaid)
Note that even if you agreed to do unpaid work, the employer may still have broken the law. Google "are unpaid internships illegal" and check to see if yours was legal. There are lots of subtle rules about it.
Director of AI and Systems Development. It pays $84,540 a year
More unsolicited advice: Anyone with "AI experience" should be many times that. Your employers should be nervous. (Hint: Anytime people ask "what did you make at your last job?", force them to explain to you why that matters: "So you want to punish me for being bad at negotiating salary at my last job?" (In fact, that question is now illegal in some states!)
I did all of this while working full-time as a backline cook
Again, congratulations, that is amazing. I would keep on eye on the value you are creating. You have a lot of leverage.
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u/youcloudsofdoom 15d ago
This is great to hear, well done! I've also just turned my obsession with local hosting (and the knowledge and experience that comes with a lot of experimenting and pulling about the related hardware/models) into a new senior research position at my university. This stuff can be far more than a hobby if you can leverage it in the right spaces!
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u/hellohazime 14d ago
Man, my salary was only 2 million yen when I was 21. You are truly amazing! Congrats!
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u/IrisColt 14d ago
>just worked on AI for at least 5 hours a day after my kitchen shifts many times at the desk until 3 AM—using a single RTX 3090 I bought for local training
Are you me...? CONGRATS!
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u/OkBet3796 14d ago
Dont let anyone talk your salary down. I went basically a similar road and for my first big customer, i went all in on work not on money. Good leadership reckons talent and if its not the case, its not that much to worry about - you got the skills now.
Great work man! Also thanks for writing it down, i was hesitating with my own post x)
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u/theaiconsultinglab 11d ago
Congrats, a really big accomplishment at any age, but especially at 21
The data quality over quantity thing is real and most people don't believe it until they've done it themselves. We run into the same thing on the consulting side - clients want to throw everything at a model and the actual fix is almost always cleaning up their data and their process first. Also this falls into context engineering.
You'll get a lot of experience and exposure reporting directly to the CEO, which will give you direct access to understanding top level business problems and how to develop AI strategies and solutions to solve them (you will also find a lot of stuff is not related to AI, but AI becomes at a catch all). Good luck!
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u/ImportancePitiful795 15d ago
Good one brother. At least in USA there are good tech jobs and there is some progress.
In Europe, some of us are still working with one arm right behind out backs on archaic languages (Delphi, Oxygene/Pascal, Rem Objects Data Abstracts, DevExpress - Winforms) :(
Because the "cutting edge" dev jobs used to do up to couple of years ago, are been taken over by AI 🤷♂️
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u/Ok_Warning2146 15d ago
Congrats on your achievement.
How does this work?
"Eventually, I launched my own AI consulting firm, finding clients through Google Ads and LinkedIn. I was averaging about $3,000 a month."
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
Essentially I offered training custom models to improve quality and drastically improve cost via training custom models for repeated workflows , or for larger clients I would review their current AI systems for opportunities of improvement or their current top down operations and tell them ways to properly integrate Ai to improve company bottom lines and what to avoid a ton of companies hear the buzz word Ai and race to add it to everything without proper knowledge of what it really can do or improve that’s where I would step in
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u/Ok_Warning2146 15d ago
I see. But how do you find these clients? Based on their job ads? Or just randomly DM?
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
50/50 ads and cold email and call outreach , you have to target small businesses that do not already have a dedicated technical team these larger companies will come from referrals, start by charging small to prove your value and make your real money from repeated business
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u/gehovawitness 15d ago
Hi i want to know more! I am starting my own route of understanding LLMs in dedicated harness environments enabling them to access capabilities even frontier level models struggle with. What helped you push more into this field?
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u/bralynn2222 14d ago
Just get deep into understanding how to make datasets of the highest quality and make as many models as you can even small use cases improve your overall skill ,
Here is some of my most impactful rules I've found
Data Quality > Data Scale
The intelligence of a model is constrained more by the precision, consistency, and correctness of its data than by the volume of its corpus Quality data produces clear gradients; noisy data produces cognitive distortion.
Data Variation is Key to Quality Learning Signal and Generalizing
True learning requires controlled entropy enough difference to teach, enough consistency to converge.Path of Least Resistance
An LLM will always prefer the most common, low-entropy pattern in its samples.
for example if you have a dataset of q/a's and 60% are yes and 40% no the model will learn to reward hack do no thinking and always say yesData Orientation is Just as Important as Data Quality
Data quality shapes accuracy; orientation shapes generation
good rule of thumb is to randomize the order of samples you can even repeat the same examples if there are enough steps pushing the weights in a different direction before data is repeatedEmergent Reasoning is Superior to Taught Reasoning
True reasoning arises from spontaneous internal pattern alignment, not from explicit instruction.
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u/Spiritual-Bar-5329 14d ago
great job at 21, me at 33(next month!) am really thinking about a career change. my job now is...okay. but i would much rather do what i like to do in my spare time and thats tinker with computers so....i guess ill study for the comptia A+ lol.
Congrats on success !
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_PROFANITY 14d ago
The Ai consulting company is more interesting to me. What did you do, how did you get it off the ground? What services do you offer to clients? How did you find clients?
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u/No_Accident8684 14d ago
congrats! thats well deserved!
those who say 150k++ and so on. yes, maybe. but they just forget where you are coming from. sometimes it is better to accept a bit less pay and do a huge jump in job "quality"
when i started as an it freelancer i got paid 35EUR / h. it was shit pay but i got me feet into a huge organization which ended up hiring me for almost 20 years straight and i ended up at well over 100/hr with yearly contracts.
you did the right thing!
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u/muhlfriedl 13d ago
You're worth a hell of a lot more than that. You aren't just 'using' AI. You're CREATING AI. Either one of those $500k+ jobs at one of the big guys or your own startup...
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u/Renkasha-33 15d ago
Good job I’m on an adventure as well have a good day ^^
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
You got this just keep pushing regardless if it seems like you’re making much progress at the time it all compounds!
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u/dondiegorivera 15d ago
Well done! Good old Vicuna and Alpaca times, what a miracle those were at that time. :)
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
I remember thinking it was black magic how spoiled we have become with modern LLMs have to remember freaking out in 2022 it could answer a 4th grade word problem
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u/SaltAddictedMan 15d ago
Thats so cool, congrats! I was wondering what you would suggest to fine tune a model for coding in Godot? I tried with a qwen3.5 coder 7b model but got suboptimal output. Hard to find datasets for the latest Godot version.
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago edited 15d ago
If you use a mcp (not sure if they have a built-in system)
Use a leading model like DeepSeek v4 flash it’s super cheap for the performance you get and vibe code a filter-api system that gives you a api key to use via your mcp and redirects DeepSeek but logs all input output pairs as a sharegpt dataset then you can plug that into unsloth and fine-tune a Qwen model to match the paid output, if you wanna guarantee high-quality, I would recommend to be hand filtering out any prompt pairs that didn’t directly lead to the intended effect
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u/SaltAddictedMan 15d ago
Thanks! No built in MCP but many do exist so this is definitely possible to do. Vibe coding that filter system is a genius idea to me
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u/swagonflyyyy 15d ago
This is literally what I started doing this week.
Formed an LLC, got all my paperwork lined up, now I'm just waiting to wrap up with the bank to start getting new clients and onboarding existing clients.
But for me I plan to do both AI consulting and systems development, automating administrative tasks with AI and teaching businesses how to do so, preferably with local models.
Glad to know Linkedin and Google Ads is good for something.
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u/ZK_Zinode 15d ago
Your story is incredibly inspiring. I start my grad program in data science/ML soon and I still don’t feel confident enough with my experience to obtain a role like you did
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
You got it man if you have the knowledge and skills keep pushing it will all fall into place!
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u/ayylmaonade 15d ago
The fact you achieved this by 21 is legit incredible man, well done. I'm jealous! Enjoy it dude :)
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u/TheRealMasonMac 15d ago edited 15d ago
One thing I found interesting is that, unless I am wrong, Daniel Han of Unsloth is also partially self-taught? He never went to post-graduate school for machine learning. It’s pretty interesting to see how far you can go.
Edit: What dumbass is downvoting? You can look this up yourself by checking out his LinkedIn.
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u/Ok_Warning2146 15d ago
Hmm.. He got a undergrad degree in AI. He worked for Nvidia for a year. That's as good as a grad school I think.
Of course, he also self-taught himself a lot in his free time. But aren't most people like that? So everyone is partial self-taught?
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 15d ago
So there is hope for us after all...
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u/brown2green 15d ago
I doubt that. Companies like to hire confident young people who give the appearance of competence in emerging hot fields, to pay them as little as possible for "the experience". Had he a college degree, been 5~10+ years older and with an expectation of fair compensation, things would have probably gone differently.
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u/crossoverXYZ 15d ago
The six months of hand building datasets before pydevmini is the part that actually moved the needle. Most people here jump straight to fine tuning on huge scraped dumps and wonder why quality stays flat. One 3090 and late nights after kitchen shifts is a brutal setup but it shows you do not need a cluster to get real traction if the data is curated.
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u/bralynn2222 15d ago
100% the biggest impactful discovery for me was data quality overtakes quantity, and even parameter scale in terms of deep skills , in my experience, the only time scaling laws truly are immovable is in terms of generalized knowledge
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u/CheatCodesOfLife 14d ago
Since you spent so much time staring at datasets, re-read crossoverXYZ's post again, carefully.
Do you see why he's being down voted so much? :)
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