Hire AI and ML engineers · Dedicated, monthly
Hire AI and ML engineers who start in 5 to 10 days.
Engineers who take AI features from demo to production: retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, cost control and monitoring. Vetted in five steps, working in your tools and time zone, with a two-week replacement guarantee.
1 senior AI/ML engineer · 160 hours a month
from $4,800/month
All-inclusive, no recruitment fee, two-week replacement guarantee.
Monthly rates
| Level | Experience | Monthly | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-level | 3 to 5 years | $3,600 to $4,800 | $23 to $30 |
| Senior | 5 to 8 years | $4,800 to $6,600 | $30 to $41 |
| Lead | 8+ years | $6,600 to $7,800 | $41 to $49 |
Full-time, 160 hours a month, equipment and HR included. No recruitment fee. See all rates.
Short answer
Innovation Insight provides dedicated AI and ML engineers from $4,800 a month for a senior engineer and $3,600 for mid-level, full-time on our payroll and working in your repositories, tools and time zone. You get a shortlist within 48 hours, a start within 5 to 10 business days, and a free replacement if the fit is wrong in the first two weeks. Rates are published per level and include equipment, HR and management overhead.
Rates and terms checked · Updated
What our AI and ML engineers bring.
- LLM integration (OpenAI, Anthropic, open models)
- RAG and vector search
- AI agents and tool use
- Evaluation and guardrails
- Python, LangChain, FastAPI
- Classical ML, scikit-learn
- MLOps, monitoring
- Data pipelines
When teams hire this role from us.
- Add an assistant over your documentation and data
- Automate a support or back-office workflow with agents
- Move a notebook model into a monitored production service
Three ways to hire AI and ML engineers, compared.
What changes is who carries the hiring risk and the overhead. The monthly figures are for one senior engineer.
| Innovation Insight | Freelance marketplace | US in-house hire | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost (senior) | $4,800 to $6,600, all-inclusive | Hourly, set by the freelancer, plus platform fees | About 16,200 with benefits |
| Hiring model | Full-time on our payroll, working in your tools | Independent contractor, hourly or per project | Employee with benefits, equipment and office |
| Time to start | 5 to 10 business days | Days to weeks, depending on who is available | A full recruitment cycle: sourcing, interviews, notice period |
| Time to scale | Add or release engineers with 30 days' notice | A new search per hire | A recruitment cycle per hire |
| Replacement | Free replacement in the first two weeks, then 30 days' notice to scale down | Trial period, then re-match | Notice period and a new recruitment cycle |
| Who manages | You, with our delivery lead on call | You | You |
US in-house cost: the BLS median salary for software developers (May 2024, OEWS 15-1252), loaded for benefits with the BLS wage share of total compensation (ECEC), divided by twelve. Freelance rates vary by profile and marketplace, so no figure is given.
From brief to first commit.
- 01
Brief
Tell us the stack, seniority and start date. 15 minutes on a call or a short form.
- 02
Shortlist in 48 hours
Two or three profiles with CVs, code samples and interview notes.
- 03
Interview
You interview them your way. Technical test optional; we already ran ours.
- 04
Start in 5 to 10 days
Access, onboarding and first stand-up in your hours. Two-week replacement guarantee.
Five steps before you see a profile.
Two-week free replacement if an engineer is not the right fit, and a 30-day notice to scale down.
- 01CV and portfolio screen against the role brief
- 02Technical interview with a senior engineer in the same stack
- 03Live coding or take-home exercise reviewed for quality, not speed
- 04English communication and async-writing check
- 05Reference check and background verification before onboarding
Projects from our portfolio built with this stack.
Case studies whose stack includes the tools our AI and ML engineers use day to day.
Physical security and manned guarding
An AI-assisted body-camera operations platform for security patrols
AI video analysis platform case study: body-camera footage turned into searchable incidents, Vertex AI reviews and client-ready PDF reports for a US security operator.
Read the case studyAI · Consumer SaaS
An AI personal historian that turns interviews into family memoirs
AI story generation SaaS case study: chat, SMS and phone interviews turned into memoir chapters by GPT-4, with Stripe and PayPal billing on Vercel.
Read the case study
AI · Document processing · Enterprise SaaS
A multi-tenant AI document processing platform with usage-based billing
AI document processing SaaS case study: multi-tenant OCR on AWS Lambda with Redis queues, a MongoDB database per organisation and four Stripe plans.
Read the case studyWeighing an agency instead of a hire? See AI agent companies compared.
What an AI/ML engineer does on our teams
An AI/ML engineer takes a feature from a promising demo to a production service that is measured, safe and affordable. On client teams they build retrieval over company data, design agent workflows with tool use, write the evaluation set that every prompt change is tested against, and put guardrails, caching and per-request cost limits in place. They also handle the classical side: training and deploying scikit-learn or PyTorch models with drift monitoring.
How we assess AI/ML engineers
- Retrieval design: chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking and how to evaluate retrieval quality
- Evaluation and safety: building an eval set, measuring regressions, prompt injection and output guardrails
- Cost and latency: model selection, caching, streaming, token budgets and fallbacks
- Sample task: build a RAG service over a supplied document set with an eval harness and a cost report, in four hours
One engineer, a team, or a fixed-scope project.
One dedicated AI/ML engineer
Monthly, full-time, at the rates on this page. Best when you have a product team and need capacity in this stack.
A team with a delivery lead
Several engineers, QA and a lead who runs the sprints, reporting to you. Scale up or down with 30 days' notice.
Staff augmentationA fixed-scope project
A priced estimate with milestones when the scope is known. See our ai and data solutions and pricing.
AI and Data SolutionsWhat it's like to work with us.
Unedited, from founders and product leads who trusted us with their roadmap.
Innovation Insight has been a game-changer for our platform. Their expertise in UX/UI design and seamless technical integration helped us enhance user engagement, and their attention to detail ensured a flawless experience. We're beyond satisfied with the outcome and their commitment to our vision.
VonzaSaaS · Creator economyWorking with Innovation Insight felt like a true collaboration. Their team was responsive, creative, and focused on delivering results that matched our brand identity. Thanks to them, we now have a solution that not only meets our needs but exceeds expectations. Highly recommended!
MatterbooksPublishing · MediaInnovation Insight provided us with an innovative and scalable solution that transformed the way we manage our operations. Their approach to problem-solving, combined with their deep understanding of technology, made them an invaluable partner. The results speak for themselves.
SolasEnterprise · OperationsHiring AI and ML engineers, answered.
Which models do you work with?
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google APIs, plus open models such as Llama and Mistral when data residency or cost demands it.
How do you keep our data private?
Models can run in your cloud account or VPC, prompts are logged under your control, and we sign a DPA and NDA before access.
Do you build evaluation into the work?
Yes. Every LLM feature ships with an evaluation set and a dashboard so regressions are caught before users see them.
How much does it cost to hire a AI/ML engineer from Innovation Insight?
A dedicated AI/ML engineer costs $3,600 to $4,800 a month at mid-level, $4,800 to $6,600 at senior and $6,600 to $7,800 at lead level, for 160 hours a month with equipment, HR and management included and no recruitment fee. The hourly equivalents are $23 to $49. All rates are on the pricing page.
Do your AI and ML engineers work in our time zone?
Our AI and ML engineers work from Lahore and Sialkot, Pakistan, which is UTC+5 all year. That gives a full-morning overlap with Europe and four to five hours with the US East Coast, and stand-ups happen in your working hours. See how we work for the day-to-day routine.
How quickly can a AI/ML engineer start, and what if it does not work out?
Innovation Insight sends a shortlist of AI and ML engineers within 48 hours of the brief and the engineer starts within 5 to 10 business days of your decision. Two-week free replacement if an engineer is not the right fit, and a 30-day notice to scale down.
Other roles
All roles and rates: hire developers. Prefer a managed project? See our ai and data solutions service.