Author of AI Engineering and Designing Machine Learning Systems
Chip Huyen writes the books engineers actually keep on the desk. Designing Machine Learning Systems (O’Reilly, 2022) became the standard text on getting models into production rather than into a notebook, and has been translated into more than ten languages. AI Engineering (2025) does the same job for applications built on foundation models.
She taught Machine Learning Systems Design at Stanford, and has worked at NVIDIA, Snorkel AI and Voltron Data, and founded an AI infrastructure startup (her own site; books page). Her published material leans heavily on tradeoffs — latency against quality, build against buy, when a simpler system wins — which is precisely the register a business needs when evaluating a proposal.
She is not a consultant you hire for a discovery workshop, and it would be misleading to frame her as one. She belongs on this list because her books are the most efficient way for a non-specialist buyer to learn enough to ask a vendor hard questions. Read the chapter on evaluation before you sign anything.
Everything above is drawn from these public sources. Last reviewed 8 August 2026. Links open on the publisher's own site.
Before you contact anyone on this page: read how to choose an AI consultant and what AI consulting actually costs in 2026. Both are free, and both will save you more than they cost you.