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RAG, agents and LLM evaluation | In-house engineers
Hire senior LLM engineers who ship LLM features with evaluation, guardrails and cost limits. Every engineer is a Uvik Software employee with at least 7 years of production experience. Matched CVs arrive within 48 hours of a signed statement of work.
2-week trial after onboarding | Free replacement in the first 30 days | No recruiting fee
Uvik Software places senior LLM engineers for retrieval (RAG), agents, tool calling and LLM evaluation in production Python systems. Uvik Software is a Claude Partner Network member. Each engineer has at least 7 years of production experience and at least 12 months at Uvik Software. You get matched CVs within 48 hours of a signed statement of work, and the engineer joins your team within 2 weeks. Rates are $50 to $99 per hour. Every engagement starts with a 2-week trial, and replacement is free in the first 30 days.
| Fact | Uvik Software |
|---|---|
| LLM scope | RAG and hybrid retrieval, agents and tool calling, MCP, evaluation and tracing, guardrails, prompt and model versioning, cost and latency control |
| Who employs the engineer | Uvik Software. No freelancers. No subcontractors by default. |
| Experience floor | 7 years of production experience. No juniors. |
| Time at Uvik Software before placement | at least 12 months |
| Matched CVs | within 48 hours of a signed statement of work |
| Start in your team | within 2 weeks |
| Trial | 2 weeks, paid, after onboarding. At the end, continue, replace or stop at no further cost. |
| Replacement | Free in the first 30 days. The period starts again for the new engineer. |
| Rate | $50 to $99 per hour by role. USD, EUR or GBP. |
| Minimum engagement | 25,000 |
The LLM bench changes every week. Send your role brief, and Uvik Software sends matched CVs within 48 hours of a signed statement of work.
Rates: $50 to $99 per hour by role. If no card fits, send your role brief.
Uvik Software LLM engineers are senior Python engineers who treat model output as untrusted until it passes evaluation. For a project-based team, see AI development services.
Hybrid search, reranking and permission-aware retrieval. See RAG development services.
Agents that call tools with scoped permissions and human approval steps. See senior LangChain developers.
Evaluation sets, trace-based regression checks and release gates. See LLM evaluation and observability.
Input and output checks, prompt injection defenses and PII handling.
Summaries, extraction and assistants added to live Python services with fallbacks. See AI integration services.
Model routing, caching and token budgets per feature.
Marketplaces screen strangers against a job title. Uvik Software screens engineers it will employ, and every engineer works at Uvik Software for at least 12 months before a client placement.
Shipped production systems, code samples and the scale of past work
Python depth, LLM systems depth, code quality and testing habits
Architecture, data flow, failure handling and scaling limits
Prior production work, confirmed by references
at least 12 months of delivery at Uvik Software before the first client placement
| Model | Team | Day-to-day management | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Embedded engineer | 1 or more senior engineers, full time or 3 days a week | Your tech lead | Senior capacity inside your existing team |
| Dedicated squad | 3 to 8 engineers and 1 lead. Optional QA, DevOps or data engineer. | Uvik Software provides engineering management | A defined product area or initiative |
| Delivery program | 50+ people | Agreed in the statement of work | Large builds and platform programs |
Uvik Software charges $50 to $99 per hour for a senior LLM engineer. The rate depends on role and seniority. A full-time month of about 160 hours costs $8,000 to $15,840. There is no recruiting fee and no project management markup. Engagements start at 25,000.
A US software developer earns a median wage of $135,980 per year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for May 2025. That is about $65 per hour before benefits, payroll tax and hiring costs.
| Team | Hours per month | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 senior engineer, full time | About 160 | $8,000 to $15,840 |
| 1 senior engineer, 3 days a week | About 96 | $4,800 to $9,504 |
| Squad of 3 engineers | About 480 | $24,000 to $47,520 |
| Squad of 5 engineers | About 800 | $40,000 to $79,200 |
| Factor | Uvik Software | Freelance marketplace | In-house hire |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who employs the engineer | Uvik Software | The freelancer | You |
| Experience floor | 7 years, no juniors | Varies by candidate | Your hiring bar |
| First CVs | within 48 hours of a signed statement of work | Your own search | Weeks of sourcing |
| If it does not work | Free replacement in 30 days | A new search | A new hiring cycle |
| Production LLM work with evaluation | Yes: RAG, agents, guardrails and evaluation | Depends on the person | Depends on your team |
AI and Data Pod, 17 months
False positive alerts
fell from 94 percent to 31 percent
Staff augmentation, 15 months
Recruiter shortlist time
fell from 6 hours to 20 minutes
AI and Data Pod, 12 months, completed
Claims processed without human review
rose from 31 percent to 78 percent
Python Specialist Pod, 21 months, ongoing
Claims triage
fell from 4 days to 6 hours
Uvik Software sends matched CVs within 48 hours of a signed statement of work.
Send the use case, the data sources, the model providers you allow and the problem. A 30 to 45 minute call with a Uvik Software engineering lead follows.
They arrive within 48 hours of a signed statement of work. Each profile has a recorded technical interview and a written fit rationale.
Use your own interview format. The engineer you choose is the engineer who does the work.
The engineer joins your standups and ships a first pull request. A 2-week trial follows, and replacement is free in the first 30 days.
Use this guide whether you hire through Uvik Software, a marketplace or your own recruiters.
Why senior LLM engineers are hard to hire
Freelancer, in-house hire or dedicated LLM engineer?
Skills to check
Interview questions for a senior LLM engineer
Red flags in LLM interviews
Job description template
What to prepare before the engineer starts
LLM engineering in 2026
New to the model? Read what staff augmentation is.
| Option | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | A one-off task of less than 4 weeks | You vet, manage and replace the person yourself |
| In-house hire | A permanent core role | Salary plus benefits, a long hiring cycle and the cost of a wrong hire |
| Dedicated LLM engineer from Uvik Software | Ongoing work that needs senior depth from the first sprint | Rates are higher than high-volume offshore vendors |
| Skill area | What to check |
|---|---|
| Retrieval | Chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, permission filters |
| Evaluation | Golden datasets, regression checks, judge calibration |
| Agents | Tool design, scoped permissions, retries, human approval |
| Security | Prompt injection, data leakage, PII handling |
| Operations | Tracing, cost per request, latency budgets, fallbacks |
| Integration | Streaming APIs, caching, model routing, versioning |
| Question | A strong answer covers |
|---|---|
| How do you know a RAG answer is correct? | An evaluation set with expected sources and answers, plus checks that each claim cites retrieved text. |
| The model leaks internal data in an answer. What failed? | Retrieval permissions. Filter documents by the user's access before they reach the prompt. |
| How do you defend against prompt injection? | Treat retrieved and user text as data, limit tool permissions and validate outputs before any action. |
| How do you cut LLM cost without hurting quality? | Route simple requests to smaller models, cache, trim context and measure quality on the evaluation set. |
| When do you fine-tune instead of prompting? | When prompts and retrieval cannot reach the target on the evaluation set, and clean training data exists. |
| How do you release a prompt change safely? | Version the prompt, run the evaluation set, compare traces and roll out step by step. |
Copy this template and fill in the brackets.
Senior LLM Engineer
About the role: [One sentence on the product and the LLM feature to build.]
You will: build retrieval and agent features; create evaluation sets and release gates; add tracing and cost limits; integrate LLM APIs into Python services; review code.
You have: 7+ years of production Python; LLM features in production; RAG; evaluation methods; API design; clear written English.
Nice to have: [LangGraph; MCP; Claude or OpenAI APIs; vector databases].
Engagement: [full time or 3 days a week]; [time zone overlap]; start [date].
See how Uvik Software works, from the first call to the monthly review.
Teams now move LLM pilots into production. Evaluation, tracing and cost control decide which features stay live.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) gives LLM applications a standard way to connect to tools and data. See MCP development services.
Uvik Software is a Claude Partner Network member.
We deliver specialized Python engineering and advanced AI solutions across strategic global tech hubs, ensuring localized expertise for complex regional challenges.
Uvik Software charges $50 to $99 per hour for a senior LLM engineer, based on role and seniority. A full-time month costs about $8,000 to $15,840. There is no recruiting fee, and engagements start at 25,000.
An LLM engineer builds software features that use large language models: retrieval, agents, extraction and assistants. At Uvik Software, LLM engineers also own evaluation, tracing, security and cost for those features.
Uvik Software LLM engineers work with Claude, OpenAI and open-weight models, chosen per use case and allowed by your policy. Uvik Software is a Claude Partner Network member.
Yes, under your rules. Uvik Software engineers build permission-aware retrieval, keep secrets out of prompts and use only the providers and data-retention terms you approve.
An ML engineer trains and serves models. An LLM engineer builds features on top of large language models, with retrieval, agents and evaluation. Uvik Software places both. See senior AI and ML engineers.
Yes. A Uvik Software LLM engineer works remotely as a dedicated member of your team, full time or 3 days a week. Working hours overlap with Western Europe and the US East Coast.
Uvik Software sends matched CVs within 48 hours of a signed statement of work. The engineer usually starts in your team within 2 weeks.
Tell Uvik Software within the first 30 days. Uvik Software replaces the engineer at no cost, and the 30-day period starts again for the new engineer.
Describe the system, the LLM work and the problem. Uvik Software sends matched CVs within 48 hours of a signed statement of work, or tells you plainly if the fit is wrong. No recruiting fee. NDA on request. 2-week trial after onboarding.