Hire AI Engineers for Production ML and AI Agents

AI and ML roles run $30 to $60 an hour depending on seniority, and fixed scope projects have a $10,000 minimum. Model API usage from vendors such as OpenAI or Anthropic is billed separately by the vendor. The biggest cost driver is the complexity of the AI work. A RAG integration on foundation models costs far less than training and serving custom models with strict latency or compliance needs.

Our hiring process for AI engineers includes a 60 to 90 minute live coding round in AI engineering, followed by scenario based questions on practical AI applications, such as RAG systems, LLM agents and models running in production. Candidates who pass walk us through a recent production project and clear a third party background verification. New engineers then serve a probation period, and those who do not meet our bar do not continue with us. You interview shortlisted candidates yourself before anyone joins your team.

Hire an AI engineer when the goal is a working AI feature inside your product. An AI engineer builds and ships AI systems into production, such as RAG pipelines, LLM agents, computer vision and machine learning models, along with the evaluation, guardrails and monitoring that keep them reliable. A machine learning engineer focuses more on training and serving custom models at scale, and a data scientist leans toward analysis, experimentation and modeling in notebooks.

Both. For many use cases, tuned foundation models (OpenAI GPT models, Claude, open source LLMs) deliver excellent results at lower cost than training from scratch. When your domain requires specialized capabilities that general models cannot provide, we train custom models using your data. We advise on the right approach during discovery.

We design AI systems with data privacy built in, and Unico Connect is certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 for information security management. Options include private cloud or on premise deployment, data anonymization pipelines, and role based access controls, and we design around the regulations your project carries, such as GDPR or HIPAA, together with your compliance team. For LLM integrations, we offer self hosted open source models that keep your data off third party model APIs.

Our engineers work from our engineering hub in Mumbai, India, and Unico Connect has a US presence for contracts and billing. For international clients, the assigned team aims for at least 4 hours of overlap with your business day, and our night shift team can cover your business hours for support. Standups, reviews and planning land inside that overlap, and outside it, work moves through async updates and documented decisions, so progress stays visible.