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3 startups ask for 4+ years of LLM experience. ChatGPT is 3 years old.

August 2026

ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, so it is three years and nine months ago. Three companies ask for more LLM experience than that 🫠

  • Pencil, Head of Agent Architecture: "8+ Years of Direct GenAI Experience, with 2+ Years Leading People or a Function"
  • Allocate, Machine Learning Engineer: "4+ years of applied ML / LLM engineering in production"
  • AZX, Software Engineer: "4+ years of experience building production LLM/agent pipelines"

Pencil, an AI advertising company, asks for eight years of direct generative AI experience. Eight years before the post went up is August 2018. For reference:

  • June 2017: the Transformer paper is published
  • June 2018: OpenAI releases GPT-1
  • February 2019: GPT-2
  • June 2020: the GPT-3 API opens to a private beta
  • November 2022: ChatGPT
  • March 2023: Claude

Direct generative AI experience in 2018 means working at OpenAI, Google Brain, or a university NLP lab.

What most posts say instead

Most AI roles in our data do not attach a number of years to LLM experience. Of the 4,304 remote software engineering posts we have, 1,058 mention LLMs, and 34 turn it into a years requirement. Several say the opposite:

  • Fieldguide, hiring AI engineers at three levels: "We care more about capability and trajectory than years on a resume."
  • Windmill, AI Engineer: "0-5 years of experience" and "we care more about what you've built than years on a resume."
  • RxSense, Principal AI Ops Engineer: "We care more about depth and drive than years on a resume."
  • Ruby Labs, Senior AI Engineer: "Less experience may be considered for exceptional candidates."

What this means if you are applying

The usual requirement for LLM work at remote startups is two years of shipping features on top of models. One production feature with retrieval, tool calling or an agent loop covers it.

When a post asks for four or more years of LLM experience, the number is above what almost anyone can have. Apply anyway and describe what you shipped.

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3 startups ask for 4+ years of LLM experience. ChatGPT is 3 years old.