When comedian Hasan Minhaj told a Baltimore crowd to learn to code to fund their hobbies, Jeffrey Scruggs took the advice to heart.
“I feel some people are scared of new things. We need to embrace new technology, because this isn’t going anywhere. The more quickly you embrace it, the better. “
Jeffrey Scruggs, Majestic Light Group
The recent Morgan State University graduate was working as a traffic engineer at the time but wanted to be closer to the cutting edge of tech while supporting his other passions.
So he signed up for a coding bootcamp, spending his nights learning Python and experimenting with artificial intelligence.
He got in at the right time. A few years ago, as employers were just starting to hire for a fast-expanding AI niche, Scruggs’s early projects caught recruiters’ attention.
Now, he has a lot on his plate. Scruggs works for LMI, a government-focused tech consulting firm, builds apps on the side and continues pushing deeper into the AI world that first hooked him.
He’s also the chief technology officer of Venture for Them, a startup accelerator that supports HBCU entrepreneurs. Scruggs helped build the organization’s Fund.FWD app, a platform designed to connect students and alumni with funding opportunities.
In this How I Got Here, Scruggs shares how he landed his first job as an AI engineer, and what he thinks computer science graduates should focus on now.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your tech journey begin?
I grew up around computers. I remember being on AOL, being on dial-up since I was a kid, playing video games and stuff like that. However, when I went to college — I went to Morgan State University — I got a degree in traffic and highway engineering, which is not very tech-focused at all.
As I was graduating, I was doing a lot of research on autonomous vehicles, but I didn’t know the coding aspects of it.
After some time in the industry, I decided that I wanted to go straight into coding and see what’s possible. I went to a coding bootcamp, and I learned the basic principles. From there, I would work as a traffic engineer during the day, and I would teach myself artificial intelligence at night. I did that for about a year.
How did you get your first job as an AI engineer?
I just started uploading my projects online. One of my first projects was a cat and dog image recognizer, where you could upload any image of a cat or dog, and it would be able to tell which it was. To me, many years ago, it was like magic. It wasn’t hard-coded — it understood the image.
I made five AI apps, and from there, went viral on LinkedIn. A job recruiter reached out after seeing my challenge and said, “Please come to this job fair at BWI Airport.” I went, gave them my resume, and they said they needed AI engineers yesterday. They gave me a job on the spot.
I ended up moving to Virginia for some time, put in a bunch of work there, then came back here. That’s how I got my start.
What do you do now?
At LMI, I’m a data engineer. I can’t talk much about it because my work is classified. But essentially, I do data engineering for the government. They have a lot of public data that needs to be moved to secure systems, and they’ve tasked me with making that pipeline secure.
For Majestic Light Group — that’s my personal business — I create apps and websites for a variety of clients.
I also do a lot of talks about teaching AI and tech literacy. I feel some people are scared of new things. We need to embrace new technology, because this isn’t going anywhere. The more quickly you embrace it, the better.
What advice do you have for someone interested in going into tech?
Embrace the latest AI. Get a paid subscription — the free ones are usually about a year behind — and just play with it to see what’s possible.
The other thing is, most coding is dead now because AI writes most of your code. As a software engineer who ended up getting a master’s in software engineering, it’s kind of like an ego death I’m going through right now.
But unleash your creativity, because with AI, you can.
