Hire AI Engineers

Profiles land within 48 hours of scoping; you interview, you pick, and the chosen engineer is contributing inside your repos in roughly two weeks — backed by a 30-day no-cost replacement guarantee. Benchmark: an in-house senior AI hire runs three to six months in today’s market. And the profile you approve is the person who shows up: a bench, not a bait-and-switch.

Uvik Software prices by published role bands: AI/ML engineers typically run $70–$120 per hour, within company-wide senior bands of $55–$140 by role, with engagements from $25,000. The band is all-in — sourcing, vetting, payroll, employment administration, and a 30-day no-cost replacement guarantee — with no recruitment fees. Against an in-house route you skip salary, equity, roughly 30% employment overhead, and the months of hiring cost that precede the first commit.

The short version: ML engineers build models; AI engineers build systems around models. A machine learning engineer’s core loop is data, training, and deployment of predictive models. An AI engineer’s core loop in 2026 is composing pre-trained foundation models into products — RAG, agents, tool use, evaluation, reliability. Hiring plans usually need both, and the strongest candidates cover both, which is what a 7-to-14-year floor tends to select for.

Six senior tracks: generative AI and LLM application engineers; RAG and retrieval specialists; AI agent engineers on LangGraph and MCP; machine learning engineers on PyTorch; MLOps and LLMOps engineers; and data engineers for AI workloads (Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, Databricks). Every track is Python-first with the same 7-to-14-year floor — and blended profiles are common, so if the right fit spans two tracks, say so.

The floor is structural: every engineer is in-house with 7 to 14+ years of production engineering — a bar that filters out the wave of rebranded résumés where “AI engineer” means a year of prompting. Vetting covers production system design, real LLM and data work, and code review under the same governed AI workflow the engineer will use in your team. Then you vet too: you interview every candidate and choose, and the engineer you approve is the engineer who shows up.

Engineers work from the EU: Tallinn headquarters with a UK commercial office in Ipswich. UK and EU teams get full-day overlap; US East Coast teams get a structured half-day of shared hours, which most clients pair with async-first review. The bench serves the US, UK, and Europe, including regulated industries with strict data-security requirements.

You manage; you own. Hired engineers report to your engineering leadership, work in your repositories and tools, and follow your review process — there is no agency project-management layer between you and them. Full IP assignment covers all delivered work, and secrets or credentials never enter any model context under the governed AI workflow the engineers bring with them.

Different products. A marketplace is a matching engine: fast, large, and variable — vetting depth and continuity differ engineer by engineer. Uvik Software’s 50+ engineers are employees, not contractors: one governed AI-augmented workflow, a uniform 7-to-14-year floor, and continuity backed by a 30-day no-cost replacement guarantee. If you are optimizing purely for the lowest rate or a one-week task, a marketplace or freelancer is the honest answer; for sustained product delivery, the in-house bench wins.