Elios Certified
How we screen for AI-native talent.
The AI engineering market is flooded with resumes that list "LLM experience" but can’t survive a real technical conversation. Elios Certified engineers have been pressure-tested by senior AI practitioners across three dimensions before they ever touch a client engagement.
Screening dimensions
Three pillars: consulting delivery, production AI, current fluency
Conducted by
Senior practitioners building the same systems daily
Audience
For CTOs & engineering leaders evaluating Elios talent
WHAT WE SCREEN FOR
Three dimensions, evaluated independently.
A candidate must clear all three. Strong production work doesn’t compensate for stale tooling knowledge. Sharp AI fluency doesn’t compensate for an inability to translate decisions for a stakeholder.
Consulting delivery
Engineers who have been in the room with stakeholders, presented technical recommendations, and then delivered on those recommendations. They have owned projects from scoping through deployment. They understand that building the right thing matters as much as building the thing right.
What we verify
Client-facing experience. Ability to translate technical decisions for non-technical audiences. A track record of projects that shipped, not just started.
Production AI building
Engineers who have built AI systems that real users depend on. That means RAG pipelines with retrieval metrics, agent architectures with observability, LLM integrations with cost controls and fallback strategies. They know the difference between a demo and a product.
What we verify
Production systems with measurable outcomes. Experience with evals, hallucination mitigation, latency optimization, and cost management. Full-stack capability across Python, TypeScript, React, and modern backend frameworks.
Current AI fluency
AI tooling moves weekly. We screen for engineers who are actively building with the latest tools, not just reading about them. Our technical screeners are practitioners themselves, and the conversation is designed to surface whether a candidate is genuinely in the trenches or coasting on last year’s knowledge.
What we verify
Daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor). Familiarity with current frameworks, protocols, and models. Awareness of what shipped this month, not just what was in a course six months ago.
BEFORE THE CONVERSATION
It starts inside Elios Insights.
Long before a candidate reaches a screening conversation, the search begins in Elios Insights, our proprietary talent platform. Background and resume review is not a one-off task. It runs against a curated database, with structured requirements and a tracked funnel for every role.
200,000+
Specialists in our talent database, searchable by role, skills, and location
Prism
AI-assisted search turns a plain-language brief into a ranked shortlist
Curated
Every shortlisted profile is reviewed by a recruiter with a documented reason
Search in plain language. Prism translates a brief like "AI Engineer in Orlando, Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch" into a ranked shortlist across the full database, with optional filters for role, location, experience, and skills.
A tracked funnel for every role. Each role becomes a structured Talent Request with defined requirements and skills. Candidates move through a tracked funnel, from sourcing through screening to close, so nothing is informal and nothing is lost.
ELIOS CURATED
A reviewed profile, not a scraped one.
Every shortlisted candidate is curated by a recruiter before it ever reaches you. The profile pulls together full career history, tenure signals, education, and an AI-generated summary.
Crucially, each one carries a documented reason for curation, attributed to the recruiter who made the call. The resume review is on the record, not a gut feeling.
SCREENING PROCESS
Three stages. No algorithm trivia.
Once a curated shortlist is in hand, each candidate runs a gated, three-stage screen. A candidate progresses only when the prior signal is strong enough to justify the next reviewer’s time.
- 01
Resume and portfolio review
Run inside Elios Insights against our curated database. We evaluate career trajectory, production AI experience, and consulting or delivery background. We look for evidence of ownership: "I built" not "my team built."
- 02
Outside source verification
We review GitHub contributions, LinkedIn activity, published writing, and open-source involvement. We are looking for signs of an engineer who is active in the AI community and building in public.
- 03
Technical conversation with a senior practitioner
This is not a whiteboard algorithm quiz. It is a practitioner-to-practitioner conversation about real systems, real tradeoffs, and real tools. We discuss what they have built, how they made architectural decisions, and what they are working with right now. Our screeners know what good looks like because they are building the same kinds of systems every day.
WHAT WE SCREEN OUT
Not everyone with "AI" on their resume meets the bar.
We actively filter for patterns that signal a candidate will struggle in a client-facing deployment role.
Academics who don’t ship.
Strong on theory, comfortable in notebooks, but no track record of putting AI systems into production where real users interact with them.
Delegators, not doers.
Candidates who describe every accomplishment as "my team" without demonstrating personal technical contribution. We need engineers who can get hands-on, not just manage from a distance.
AI-dependent, not AI-native.
There is a critical difference between engineers who use AI tools to amplify their judgment and engineers who outsource their thinking and taste to AI. We look for people who review, refine, and take ownership of every line that ships. No unreviewed code. No AI slop.
PROOF POINT
What a Certified Forward Deployed Engineer looks like.
A recent candidate who passed our screening demonstrated the following profile.
The bar
Architect, builder, communicator.
Over a decade of production software engineering across enterprise consulting engagements, with three-plus years focused on LLM-powered systems. They had architected a multi-agent platform using the orchestrator-workers pattern with MCP integrations, built hybrid RAG pipelines with measurable retrieval metrics, and shipped a merchant-facing AI product handling thousands of daily queries with 99.9% availability.
In our technical conversation, they spoke fluently about local model tool calling, MCP resource patterns beyond just tool calls, and the tradeoffs of current agentic coding tools. They could explain their architectural decisions to a non-technical audience without losing precision. They had consulting delivery experience at a major firm and had led teams of engineers across distributed environments.
That is the bar.
HOW WE VET
Expedited, or advanced vetting.
Every Elios Certified engineer is fully vetted. The only question is how deep we go, and that comes down to the time you have per candidate and how urgent the role is. We back expedited vetting completely. When the schedule allows, advanced vetting adds one hour of live agentic coding on top.
Expedited Vetting
Our three-stage vet: resume and portfolio review, outside-source verification, and a practitioner-to-practitioner technical conversation. Every Elios Certified engineer clears this bar, and we stand fully behind it.
Advanced Vetting
Everything in expedited vetting, plus one hour of live agentic coding. A senior practitioner sits down with the candidate and works through a real system-design problem together.
THE LIVE SESSION
An open-book system-design problem, with the tools they actually use.
The candidate works through a realistic system-design problem while using agentic coding tools like Claude Code. It is open book, and we encourage responsible AI use, because that mirrors how the work actually happens on a client engagement, not an artificial gauntlet.
A senior practitioner stays in the room the entire hour, probing decisions in real time. The point is not to catch someone using AI. It is to see whether they direct it or hide behind it.
Thinking, not offloading.
The candidate drives the architecture and the judgment. They do not paste the problem in and ship whatever comes back.
Prompting with intent.
They direct a model precisely, recognize a weak answer when they see one, and iterate toward a real solution.
Asking the right questions.
They surface the system-design and scoping questions they would put to a client before writing a single line of code.
Why one hour, not two. We will not make a Forward Deployed Engineer spend two hours interviewing with an AI. It is disrespectful, and in this hot market the caliber of candidate we work with will not play those games. One focused hour of live agentic coding tells us what we need. Anything more wastes their time and yours.
Trust the engineers we place.
Elios screens Forward Deployed Engineers so our clients don’t have to. Every Elios Certified engineer has been validated by practitioners who build the same systems, use the same tools, and hold the same standards we expect on your engagement.