I have a mixed hands-on practical history, and an eclectic self-taught background in AI, computational intelligence, and machine learning before it was called that. From experience, can say you need the guy who can put it all together in a real working prototype. There are tons of academics smarter than me, and some of my past collegues, but it only counts where the rubber meets the road, aptly punned.

I have been self-teaching myself neural networks, genetic programming and algorithms and AI since the 80s. I remember the 'Decade of the Brain' the 90s and reading Patricia Churchland and Terence Sejnowski's book 'The Computational Brain'. I was also a welder building motorized and pneumatic and hydraulic animiatronics in the 90s. I started to go deep on the engineering, and it helped a lot, but there was a guy I worked with who commanded the time and space and materials in front of him, and had a gut feeling on how to put it all together.

Systems integrations is important, but interative and incremental design, also familiar as a design methodology in coding is the way to achieve results. This is because the individual engineering of subsystems, and the subsequent computer modeling fall short of the emergent behaviors of a real physical prototype.

If I were hiring, I would not be scouring Udacity or the Unis, but lone wolf garage engineers and tinkerers with the math aptitude too. Two of the successful companies I worked at started in somebody's garage, and both were not college educated. Find people who have managed to somehow put together 60% of what you're looking for and then fund them and set them loose.

Too many of the engineers I've worked with were great with churning out the stuff they were taught, but in the one-offs, or bespoke, which seems to be the fashionable word nowadays, they failed miserably with 'paralysis through analysis' too much analysis.

This is why when I had my own business in the early 2000s, I lamented the death of the trade school in the U.S. It was very difficult finding young people who could actually build stuff. The maker movement is welcoming, but a lot of it tends to be mechatronic, and high tech. You don't see too many 'makers' nowadays that are capable of fabricating without a 3D printer, or making heavy-duty iron mechanical monstrosities like some 'Junkyard Wars' aficionados were building for a while.

This is also why it is hard to find people to work on the BIG projects like tunnel-boring machines (well this has picked up somewhat), or other big equipment. Now imagine finding someone who can also design compliant controls and mechanics for all of this. Certainly worth $10M per person!