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The AI engineering desk of Prized
Specialist search for the people who build, train, evaluate and operate AI systems in production.
- AI Engineering
- Robotics & Physical AI
- Liquid Cooling & Data Center
3 practices
specialist search for the AI era
Who we are
Specialist search for the AI era
HireAIEngineers.com is the AI engineering desk of Prized.
Prized is a specialist search firm working across three markets where the roles are new, the talent pools are small, and conventional recruitment doesn't reach the people who matter: AI Engineering, Robotics & Physical AI, and Liquid Cooling & Data Center Infrastructure.
Each practice is built around a talent market that moves faster than conventional recruitment can keep up with, and each is run by people who know the work well enough to judge it.
HireAIEngineers.com covers AI and machine learning engineering: the engineers who turn foundation models into products, train models on proprietary data, and run the infrastructure that serves them.
Why this desk exists
The roles are new. The hiring playbook isn't.
Three years ago most of the roles we recruit here did not exist.
There was no agentic systems engineer, no evaluation engineer, no LLMOps function, and "AI engineer" was not a title anyone put on a job description.
That speed is the problem buyers face. Job descriptions get written from blog posts. Leveling is guesswork, because nobody has ten years of experience with foundation models — the foundation models are barely four years old. And the market is full of candidates whose resumes look identical and whose depth is not.
Meanwhile the supply side has tightened rather than loosened. Inbound migration of AI researchers to the US has fallen sharply, the frontier labs absorb a large share of the most experienced people, and every well-funded company is hiring from the same pool at the same time.
This desk exists to close that gap — for the companies hiring, and for the engineers who are genuinely good and tired of being screened by keyword.
HireAIEngineers.com · Engineering for the AI Era
We build the specialist teams that take AI from demo to dependable
How we work
Five principles behind every search
01
Scoped by problem, not by title
We want to understand the system, the stack and the first six months before a search starts. Roles scoped by keyword attract the wrong people and repel the right ones.
02
Market-mapped
We build a long-term picture of this market by discipline, continuously, and share it whether or not you hire through us. When you brief us we're matching from a network already built.
03
Senior-led
Every search is led by the person you meet on the first call. Nothing is handed to a junior resourcer.
04
Selective
Three or four candidates per shortlist. If you need to run a second screening process on our shortlist, we haven't done our job.
05
Honest early
If a role isn't hirable as written, or the package won't close the candidate you want, you'll hear it on the first call rather than six weeks in.
See it in practice
How a search runs
Six stages from scoping call to signed offer, with a shortlist in two to three weeks.
Our standards
What you can hold us to
01
Evaluation is the gate
We assess production evidence, not vocabulary. If a candidate has never built evaluation, we say so rather than letting a strong resume carry them through.
02
Candidate experience is paramount
Confidentiality and honest feedback, every time. Relationships here are built over years, and a candidate badly handled this year is a candidate lost for a decade.
03
Specialist, not generalist
Depth in three adjacent markets rather than shallow coverage of thirty.
04
We publish what we know
Our hiring guides and market commentary are free and public, because a buyer who understands the market is easier to help than one who doesn't.
Wayne Lindor
PRINCIPAL | PRIZED
Wayne heads up the AI Engineering practice at Prized, recruiting across LLM applications, agents, retrieval and evaluation, machine learning and research, and the ML infrastructure underneath — up to and including VP Engineering, Head of AI, Chief AI Officer and CTO level.
Hiring senior leaders into one of the fastest-growing consultancies in the world gave him a deep appreciation of both sides of the desk — and a firm belief that candidate experience is paramount. It shapes how every search here is run.
Let's talk
Whether you're hiring or considering your next role, it starts with a brief call and an honest read on the market.