Hire AI engineers who build agents, RAG and LLM features
Webify.AI is an AI and software company in Ahmedabad, India, and an IBM Partner. Hire AI / LLM engineers at $45 an hour or senior AI engineers at $60, interview them first, and start with a two-week trial.
Two named profiles in 48 hours
You interview both and choose. We sign your NDA before the first call.
A two-week trial
No charge if you stop within the first five working days.
Your code, your IP
Engineers commit to your repositories, and the IP in all code is assigned to you.
What do AI engineers for hire actually build?
AI engineers build software that uses language models to do useful work. Typical projects are AI agents that act inside your tools, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over your own documents, and LLM features inside an existing product. They also build the evaluation, guardrails and monitoring that keep those systems reliable once real users arrive.
When you hire AI engineers from Webify.AI, you get people whose main work is this kind of system. We are the company behind the AI agents in our Bot Store, so our engineers work on real agent projects, not only demos.
Many AI projects do not train a model at all. They choose an existing model, connect it to the right data and tools, and prove that it gives good answers. That is the work AI engineers for hire are usually brought in to do.
Customer support
An agent that answers routine questions from your help centre, drafts replies for harder ones and hands the rest to a person.
Internal knowledge
Question answering over policies, contracts, manuals or product documents, with a link to the passage behind each answer.
Document processing
Reading invoices, forms or contracts, pulling out the fields you need and flagging anything that looks wrong.
Sales and operations
Drafting follow-ups, summarising calls, qualifying leads and updating your CRM, with a person approving what gets sent.
Each of these needs the same core skills: retrieval, prompt and tool design, evaluation, and careful handling of data. The sections below explain how to hire for them, what it costs and what protects you.
Hire AI engineers or hire AI developers: is there a difference?
In job ads the two titles mean much the same thing. Both build software around language models. Where people do draw a line, an AI developer adds AI features to an application, while an AI engineer designs the system behind them. Our two AI tiers follow a similar split between building and leading.
| AI / LLM engineer | Senior AI engineer | |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Agents, RAG, IBM watsonx | Leads AI architecture and delivery |
| Typical work | AI agents, retrieval (RAG) and LLM integration, including deployments on IBM watsonx and open-weight models. | Designs the AI system end to end: model and retrieval choices, evaluation, guardrails, cost and the path to production. |
| Price in the US | $45 an hour, or $6,100 a month | $60 an hour, or $8,150 a month |
| Price in the UK | £36 an hour, or £288 for an 8-hour day | £48 an hour, or £384 for an 8-hour day |
| Choose this tier when | The architecture is settled, or someone on your side already leads the AI work. | Nobody on your team has taken an AI system to production yet. |
Titles matter less than the work. Describe the system you want to build, and we put forward engineers whose experience matches it. To hire AI developers for a narrow task, such as one feature in an app, start with the AI / LLM tier.
Our rates
Published prices in US dollars. Monthly plans are 160 hours, about 15% below the hourly rate.
Mid-level developer
3 to 5 years
$25 / hour
$3,400 a month (160 h)
Senior developer
6 or more years
$35 / hour
$4,750 a month (160 h)
AI / LLM engineer
Agents, RAG, IBM watsonx
$45 / hour
$6,100 a month (160 h)
Senior AI engineer
Leads AI architecture and delivery
$60 / hour
$8,150 a month (160 h)
Two-week trial with the developer you choose. No charge if you stop within the first five working days. US Eastern clients get 09:00 to 12:00 US Eastern time through an evening shift, at 15% extra. Full pricing and comparisons.
How do AI engineer costs compare by hiring route?
Through Webify.AI, an AI / LLM engineer costs $45 an hour and a senior AI engineer $60. Full-time monthly plans of 160 hours cost $6,100 and $8,150. UK clients pay £36 and £48 an hour. For comparison, KORE1 lists US staffing-agency rates for AI / ML engineers at $140 to $240 an hour.
Hourly rates are hard to compare across routes, because day rates, agency margins and monthly plans differ. The table puts each route on the same footing: what 160 hours of work costs at the published rate.
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
| Route | Published rate | 160 hours | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Webify.AI AI / LLM engineer, monthly plan | $45 an hour | $6,100 | Our published price |
| Webify.AI senior ai engineer, monthly plan | $60 an hour | $8,150 | Our published price |
| Webify.AI senior ai engineer, UK, billed hourly | £384 for an 8-hour day | £7,680 | Our published price |
| US AI / ML engineer through a staffing agency | $140 to $240 an hour | $22,400 to $38,400 | KORE1, 2026 |
| US senior software engineer through a staffing agency | $108 to $160 an hour | $17,280 to $25,600 | KORE1, 2026 |
| UK contract software developer | Median £525 a day | £10,500 | IT Jobs Watch, October 2026 |
| Senior offshore developer in Asia | $31 to $41 an hour | $4,960 to $6,560 | Accelerance, 2026 |
The 160-hour column multiplies each published rate (20 eight-hour days for day rates); it is not a quote. The UK and Asia market figures cover software developers in general, not AI specialists.
For a part-time need, a senior AI engineer on 80 hours a month costs $4,800. Full time, the monthly plan costs $8,150, against $9,600 for 160 hours billed hourly.
Three things change the total more than the rate. Hours: an hourly plan can start at 80 hours a month. Seniority: a senior AI engineer costs more per hour but makes the design choices that are expensive to undo. Working hours: US Eastern overlap through the evening shift adds 15%, while UK overlap costs nothing extra.
Every role and plan, including mid-level and senior developers, is on our pricing page.
Hire senior AI engineers: when is the senior tier worth it?
Hire a senior AI engineer when nobody on your team has taken an AI system to production. At $60 an hour, they design the whole system: model and retrieval choices, evaluation, guardrails, cost and the path to production. If the design is already settled, an AI / LLM engineer at $45 can build it.
The senior AI engineer is our highest tier. The extra cost buys judgement on decisions that are hard to reverse later. The senior tier usually earns its rate in situations like these:
- You are choosing between a hosted model, IBM watsonx and an open-weight model on your own servers.
- Your prototype works in a demo but gives wrong answers on real data.
- Nobody can say how accurate the current system is, because there is no test set.
- The cost per request keeps rising, and the pipeline needs a redesign.
- A regulator, customer or security team will ask how the system handles personal data.
- You plan to hire AI developers later and want someone to set the patterns they will follow.
One workable shape is a senior AI engineer leading one or two AI / LLM engineers. The senior sets the architecture and reviews the work, and the others build. You can also hire senior AI engineers on their own, to review an existing system or to guide your in-house developers.
You do not need the senior tier for every project. If someone on your side already owns the AI architecture, an AI / LLM engineer is usually enough.
What skills should a senior AI engineer have?
A senior AI engineer should be able to design a whole LLM system, not just call a model. That means retrieval design, evaluation with test sets, guardrails, cost and latency control, secure handling of data, and deployment. They should explain trade-offs in plain language and leave patterns that other developers can follow.
| Skill | What good looks like | Ask them |
|---|---|---|
| Retrieval design | Knows when RAG fits, how to split documents and how to check that the right passage was found. RAG systems usually store embeddings in a vector database such as pgvector. | How would you find out why the system answered from the wrong document? |
| Evaluation | Builds a test set of real questions with expected answers before tuning anything, and reruns it after every change. | How would you know if a prompt change made answers worse? |
| Guardrails | Limits what an agent can do, checks inputs and outputs, and keeps a person in the loop for risky actions. | Which actions should this agent never take without approval? |
| Cost and latency | Estimates the cost per request, uses a smaller model where it is good enough, and caches repeated work. | What would you change if our model bill doubled next month? |
| Model choice | Compares hosted models, platforms such as IBM watsonx and open-weight models on accuracy, cost, data location and licence terms. | When would you run an open-weight model on our own servers? |
| Data handling | Knows which data may reach a model provider, leaves out personal data that is not needed, and logs access. | What would you keep out of the prompt, and why? |
| Production delivery | Ships behind feature flags, monitors answers in production and plans for model updates. | What happens to our system when the model provider releases a new version? |
| Communication | Writes short design notes and explains trade-offs to people who are not engineers. | Explain the main risk of this design to our head of sales. |
A senior AI engineer should also know ordinary software engineering well. AI features live inside normal products, so testing, code review, APIs and databases still matter. Python is the main language of our AI engineers, and they work alongside our React, Next.js, Node.js and PostgreSQL developers.
How quickly can I hire a senior AI engineer?
We send two named profiles within 48 hours of your request. Each profile shows when that engineer is available. You interview both, choose one, and agree a start date that suits you and the engineer. Beyond that, the timing depends on your interview schedule and how quickly you can set up access.
- 1
Send your request
Tell us the role, the stack, the hours and the start date you want. A short note on the AI system you plan to build helps us match engineers.
- 2
We sign your NDA
If you want to share project details, we sign your NDA before the first call.
- 3
Two profiles within 48 hours
We put forward two engineers whose experience matches your stack and seniority, each with their availability.
- 4
You interview them
Run the interview your way. The questions in the skills table above are a good place to start.
- 5
Choose and agree a start date
The engineer you choose is named in the contract and starts on the date you agree.
- 6
Start the two-week trial
Two-week trial with the developer you choose. No charge if you stop within the first five working days.
We do not promise a start date before you have chosen an engineer, because it depends on that person's availability. The profiles show it up front, so you can plan around it.
Can I interview the AI engineers before hiring?
Yes. You interview every engineer we put forward before you choose, and you are never assigned someone from a pool. We put forward engineers whose experience matches your stack and seniority. You run the interview your way, with your own questions or a practical task, and the final choice is always yours.
We do not run our own scoring test and present it as proof. We match on experience, and you judge the engineer. That keeps the decision with the people who know your product.
An interview for an AI role works best when it uses your real problem. Some ideas:
- Share an anonymised sample of your documents and ask how they would build question answering over it.
- Show a wrong answer from your current prototype and ask what probably caused it.
- Ask them to sketch the evaluation they would set up in their first week.
- Ask what they would not build with a language model, and why.
- Include the person who will manage them day to day.
Is there a free trial period when hiring offshore AI developers?
Yes, in part. Every engagement starts with a two-week trial with the engineer you chose. If you stop within the first five working days, there is no charge. If you carry on, the hours are billed as normal. If the engineer is not right later, we replace them free within five working days.
Use the trial on real work, not a toy task. For an AI engineer, a good trial task is small, useful and measurable. For example:
- Build a test set of a few dozen real questions for your existing chatbot and report how it scores.
- Add retrieval over one document collection and show which answers cite the right source.
- Wrap one agent action in guardrails and logging.
- Review an existing prompt pipeline and write down the changes that would cut the cost per request.
Free replacement within five working days, with a handover overlap, for as long as the contract runs. The overlap means the work is handed over, not restarted.
Can I hire an AI engineer for a short-term contract?
Yes. Hourly plans start at 80 hours a month, so a piece of AI work lasting a month or two fits an hourly plan. Contract AI engineers come on the same terms as a long engagement: a named engineer, an NDA and a two-week trial. The IP in the code is assigned to you.
| Project | Suggested tier | What you have at the end |
|---|---|---|
| Proof of concept for question answering over your documents | AI / LLM engineer | A working prototype in your repository, and a test set showing how accurate it is |
| Review of an existing AI feature | Senior AI engineer | A written review of risks and costs, and the changes worth making |
| Adding an AI feature to an existing app | AI / LLM engineer | The feature behind a flag, with tests and a handover note |
| Moving from a hosted model to an open-weight model on your servers | Senior AI engineer | A comparison on your own test set, and a plan for the move |
| Covering for an AI engineer on leave | AI / LLM engineer | Your roadmap keeps moving while they are away |
At 80 hours a month, a contract AI engineer costs $3,600 a month, and a senior AI engineer $4,800. Hourly plans are billed every two weeks against timesheets, so you pay for the hours worked.
Short contracts work best with a clear finish line. Write down what done means before the engineer starts, and agree how the work will be handed over.
What engagement models do AI outsourcing companies offer?
AI outsourcing companies usually offer three models. Staff augmentation adds named engineers to your team, billed hourly or monthly. A dedicated team gives you several engineers working only on your product. Project outsourcing hands a fixed scope to the provider for a fixed price. Webify.AI offers all three, plus white-label engineers for agencies.
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
| Model | How you pay | Who directs the work | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hourly staff augmentation | Per hour, from 80 hours a month, billed every two weeks | You | A backlog, a short contract or a workload you cannot predict yet |
| Monthly dedicated engineer | 160 hours a month, billed in advance, about 15% below hourly | You | Ongoing AI work on your roadmap |
| Dedicated AI team | Each engineer at their own rate | You, or a senior AI engineer you appoint as lead | A larger AI build or a new AI product line |
| Project outsourcing | Fixed price or milestones | The provider | A well-defined project you do not want to manage |
| White-label for agencies | Hourly or monthly | The agency | Agencies delivering AI work under their own brand |
Most of this page is about staff augmentation, where you hire AI engineers into your own team. For a full comparison with outsourcing and in-house hiring, see AI staff augmentation.
Hire generative AI developers: what do GenAI engineers work on?
Generative AI developers build systems that produce text, answers or actions from a language model. GenAI engineers at Webify.AI work on AI agents, retrieval over your documents, LLM integration, and deployments on IBM watsonx or open-weight models. The hard part is reliability: test sets, guardrails and cost control, not a working demo.
Generative AI work splits into a few kinds of project. Each one has its own page if you want more detail.
- AI agents that take a request, plan the steps and act in your CRM, help desk or internal tools. See hire AI agent developers.
- Retrieval-augmented generation that answers questions from your own documents and shows the source. See RAG development.
- LLM integration: summaries, classification, drafting and search inside an app you already run. See hire LLM engineers.
- Private models that run on your own servers when data must stay inside your network. See offline LLM development.
As an IBM Partner, we also deploy on IBM watsonx. That suits teams that already run IBM software and want to stay on one platform.
Generative AI projects tend to fail quietly. A model gives a confident wrong answer, or the bill grows with every new user. When you hire generative AI developers, look for people who talk about testing and cost before they talk about prompts.
Hire AI product engineers: what are they, and when do you need one?
An AI product engineer builds AI features into a real product, from the model call to the screen the user sees. They combine LLM skills with ordinary web or mobile development. Hire one when the AI work sits inside an existing app and you want one person to ship it end to end.
Many AI features are small parts of a larger product. A support tool gets suggested replies. A document app gets search that understands questions. Often the hard part is the product work around the model: screens, permissions, error states and speed.
We do not have a separate AI product engineer tier. There are two honest ways to cover the role:
- An AI / LLM engineer ($45 an hour) who works in your product codebase, alongside your own front-end developers.
- An AI / LLM engineer plus one of our senior developers ($35 an hour). They cover React, Next.js, Node.js, Python and mobile, for teams without spare product developers.
Either way, ask to see the user-facing result each week, not just the model output. Users judge an AI feature by how it behaves in the product, not by a benchmark.
How do I hire an AI team rather than a single engineer?
Tell us the roles you need, and we put forward named engineers for each one. You interview them all. Each person is named in the contract and billed at their own rate. A practical first team is one senior AI engineer leading one or two AI / LLM engineers, plus a senior developer for product work.
| Team | Who | Monthly cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| Prototype | 1 AI / LLM engineer | $6,100 |
| First production system | 1 Senior AI engineer and 1 AI / LLM engineer | $14,250 |
| AI feature in an existing product | 1 AI / LLM engineer and 1 senior developer | $10,850 |
| AI product build | 1 Senior AI engineer, 2 AI / LLM engineers and 1 senior developer | $25,100 |
These are examples, not packages. You can change the hours you buy from month to month, and each engineer is billed at their own rate.
A team does not need to start at full size. Start with the senior AI engineer, agree the architecture, then add builders once the plan is clear. Hiring an AI team in stages also gives you time to judge each person before the next one joins.
Remote AI engineers for hire: how do the working hours work for US and UK teams?
Our engineers work from our delivery centre in Ahmedabad, India. UK teams get overlap from 09:00 to 13:00 UK time, inside a normal Indian working day, at no extra cost. US teams can have 09:00 to 12:00 Eastern through an evening shift at 15% extra. That is 08:00 to 11:00 Central and 06:00 to 09:00 Pacific.
Use the overlap for the conversations that need everyone present: stand-ups, design reviews and pairing. Leave focused build work for the rest of the engineer's day.
Remote AI work also needs good written habits. Ask for a short update at the end of each day, with progress, open questions and pull requests ready for review. Your team then starts its morning with something to act on.
Read the regional details for UK companies and US companies, including invoicing in GBP and USD.
What does the contract cover when you hire AI developers?
The contract names the engineer, assigns the IP in all code to you, and rules out subcontracting without your consent. We sign your NDA before the first call. A person reviews all AI-assisted code, and your code never goes into public AI tools. You are invoiced in USD in the US and GBP in the UK.
- We sign your NDA before the first call.
- You own all the code: IP is assigned to you.
- Developers are named in the contract and never swapped without your agreement.
- No subcontracting without your consent.
- A person reviews all AI-assisted code, and your code never goes into public AI tools.
If your engineer will handle personal data, we agree data-protection terms with you before they start. If your company has its own AI policy, our engineers follow it instead of our default rules.
Frequently asked questions
Which models and platforms do your AI engineers work with?
LLM integration with hosted models, deployments on IBM watsonx, and open-weight models run on your own infrastructure. Tell us the model, cloud and tools you already use. We put forward engineers whose experience matches them, and you can check that in the interview.
Are the AI engineers employees or freelancers?
Webify.AI handles their employment, equipment and replacement, and each engineer is named in your contract. We do not subcontract your work to anyone else without your consent.
Can I buy fewer than 160 hours a month?
Yes. Hourly plans start at 80 hours a month and are billed every two weeks against timesheets. Move to a monthly plan of 160 hours if the work becomes full time.
What happens if the engineer I chose leaves?
Free replacement within five working days, with a handover overlap, for as long as the contract runs. The new engineer works alongside the outgoing one for a short time, so knowledge is handed over rather than lost.
Do your AI engineers use AI coding assistants?
Yes, where they speed up the work, such as boilerplate, tests and refactoring. A person reviews every AI-assisted change before it reaches your repository. Your code and data never go into public AI tools.
Can you build AI systems that run on our own servers?
Yes. We build offline and on-premise LLM systems using open-weight models on your infrastructure. This suits organisations whose data must not leave their network. The engineers you hire can build and maintain these systems inside your team.
Do you provide AI engineers to agencies?
Yes. Agencies can hire white-label AI engineers who work under the agency's brand, in its repositories, for its clients. They never contact the agency's clients directly.
How are AI engineers billed?
Hourly plans start at 80 hours a month and are billed every two weeks against timesheets. Monthly plans (160 hours) are billed in advance. US clients pay in USD, UK clients in GBP. You see the hours on timesheets before each hourly invoice.
Do the AI engineers speak English?
Yes. All client communication is in English, written and spoken. That covers calls, chat, tickets, pull requests and design notes.
Can I hire one AI engineer and add more later?
Yes. Start with one engineer and add AI / LLM engineers, senior AI engineers or developers as the work grows. Each new person is put forward, interviewed by you and named in the contract in the same way.
What should I prepare before an AI engineer starts?
Access to your repositories, tickets and chat, and a clear first task. For AI work, also prepare sample data with personal data removed and any model or cloud accounts they should use. Real examples of good and bad answers help too.
Where is Webify.AI based?
Webify.AI is an AI and software company headquartered in Ahmedabad, India, where our delivery centre is. US clients are invoiced in USD and UK clients in GBP.
Ask for two AI engineer profiles
Tell us the role and when you need someone. We'll email two named engineers with their experience and availability within 48 hours, and you choose who to interview.
- No cost to receive profiles
- Two-week trial with the developer you choose. No charge if you stop within the first five working days.
- Invoiced in USD or GBP; IP assigned to you.