The Tech Job Nobody Listed Two Years Ago. Now It Decides Whether Your AI Product Survives.

Training a model is a one-time cost. Serving it is the bill that never stops. A new discipline quietly formed around that fact in 2026, and the gap between teams that understand it and teams that don’t is wider than the gap between GPU generations. You deploy a 70B model on an H100. In testing it’s great: 80 milliseconds to first token, smooth streaming. Then the load test hits fifty concurrent users and time-to-first-token climbs to 400 milliseconds. Nobody changed anything. The model is exactly as good as it was an hour ago...