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Hire the engineers who ship AI in production
Executive search and specialist recruitment across AI engineering, machine learning, ML infrastructure and research — for the companies building AI their customers rely on.
- Market map you keep
- Senior-led search
- Contingency or retained
2–3 wks
to a decision-ready shortlist
The market you're hiring in
Volume doesn't help in this market
If you're hiring AI engineers, you've already discovered it.
Every applicant lists LLMs. Post a role and you'll get hundreds of applications, a handful of which are relevant. Very few candidates have built evaluation, debugged a retrieval system that returned confidently wrong answers, or carried an inference bill they had to defend to a board.
The engineers who have are employed, in demand from several companies at once, and selective about what they'll move for. Reaching them takes a credible technical conversation about the problem you're solving — not a job advert.
That's the work we do. We scope the role around what the person will actually build, map the people who have built it before, and bring you a shortlist you can make a decision from.
What a search with us delivers
- A clear call on which discipline the role really needs
- A market map of who exists for your problem — yours to keep
- Three or four candidates assessed on production evidence
- An honest read on package, seniority and timeline up front
HireAIEngineers.com · Engineering for the AI Era
The team you build… …is the company you build
What we deliver
AI engineering search solutions
Three ways we support AI hiring, from the first engineer at Seed to the leader who owns model strategy at scale.
01 · Executive Search
Leadership for the AI era
Retained search for the leaders who set your AI strategy and build the team to deliver it: Heads of AI and ML, Heads of ML Platform, VPs of Engineering, Chief AI Officers and CTOs. These are the hires where technical judgment, product sense and the ability to recruit a team behind them all matter at once.
Discuss a leadership search →
02 · Specialist Search
Senior AI & ML engineers
Senior and staff engineers across LLM applications and agents, retrieval and context, evaluation, machine learning and research, ML infrastructure and LLMOps, and forward deployed engineering — each assessed on production evidence before they reach you.
Brief us on a role →
03 · Founding Hires
Your first AI engineer
The first AI hire at a Seed or Series A company sets the architecture, the evaluation discipline and the hiring bar for everyone who follows. We help you decide which profile you need first, then find the engineer who can own it end to end.
Which hire comes first? →What makes these searches different
Five things most AI searches get wrong
AI engineering hiring fails in predictable ways. Each of these is something we screen for, scope around, or tell you about before the search starts.
01
The title tells you almost nothing
"AI engineer" spans a weekend prototype and a production system at scale. Screening on keywords admits the first group and loses the second, who read a generic job description as evidence the team doesn't yet know what it needs.
02
You may be hiring across two talent markets
The LLM application layer and the ML engineering layer come from different backgrounds, benchmark pay against different employers, and want different problems. One hiring philosophy across both is a common, expensive mistake.
03
Evaluation is the hard gate
It's the clearest signal of whether someone has shipped, and it rarely appears on a resume either way. An engineer who has never built an eval harness can't tell you whether a change improved your product — so they can't improve it deliberately.
04
Nobody screens for unit economics
Cost per request, caching, model routing and the ability to explain an inference bill line by line decide whether an AI feature has a margin. Candidates who have owned that are a small subset of those who claim production experience.
05
The best candidates are assessing you
They diligence the problem, the data, the team and the realism of the roadmap before they take a second call. A badly scoped role loses them at the first conversation.
Not sure which you need?
AI engineer or ML engineer?
A five-question test for which hire your company actually needs, with six real startup scenarios.
How a search runs
Six stages, two to three weeks to a shortlist
The problem, the stack, where the system is immature, and what this person will own in their first six months. We'll tell you if the role isn't hirable as written, which discipline it genuinely needs, and whether the package will close the candidate you have in mind.
Who exists for your specific problem, where they sit, what would move them, and how your compensation and seniority expectations compare to the market. You keep the map whether or not you hire through us.
Personal outreach built around your technical problem, to engineers who aren't reading job boards.
Structured interviews covering technical substance, production evidence, motivation, timing, location and visa status. We screen out the merely curious and the people who won't move in the next six months.
Three to four candidates with a written summary of strengths and trade-offs for each, typically within two to three weeks of the scoping call.
Process management, candidate engagement, counter-offer handling and onboarding support. In a market where strong candidates hold multiple offers, the close is where searches are won or lost.
What you get
A shortlist you can decide from
A shortlist you can make a decision from, not a pipeline to screen
A written view on every candidate — what they built, at what scale, where the trade-offs are
A market map you keep, whether or not you hire through us
An honest read on compensation, seniority and timeline before you commit
A clear recommendation on which discipline the role actually needs
Who we work with
Where each hire changes the product
AI-native startups and scale-ups where each hire changes what the company can ship, alongside established businesses building serious AI capability. Typically venture-backed and under 200 people.
Engagement
Contingency or retained
Contingency
Fee payable on placement
Suited to roles with existing internal pipeline where you want additional market coverage from people who know where the engineers are.
Retained
Exclusive, prioritized search
A committed timeline and a full market map. Suited to founding engineers, technical leadership, and roles that have been open too long.
All placements carry a replacement guarantee, with terms agreed in writing before any work begins.
AI engineering talent
Hires that change what you can ship
Whether you're an AI-native startup making your first AI hire, a scale-up building out an application and platform team, or an established business standing up serious AI capability, the outcome you need is the same: engineers who have taken AI from demo to dependable before, and can do it again in your environment.
We judge a search by what happens after the offer — whether the person ships, whether they raise the bar for the engineers around them, and whether they're still with you two years later.
FAQ
Before you brief us
Can you help us scope the role before we post it?
Yes, and it's one of the most valuable parts of the first call. Deciding whether you need an AI engineer, an ML engineer or an infrastructure specialist before the role goes live routinely saves months.
Do you handle visa and relocation situations?
We establish status and requirements upfront so there are no surprises late in a process, and we're candid about the effect on your timeline.
What if we've had a role open for months already?
That's usually a scoping or positioning problem rather than a supply problem. Send us the current job description and we'll tell you what we'd change.
How long does a search take?
Typically two to three weeks to a shortlist and four to eight weeks to offer. Leadership and founding hires run longer, as do roles that need a narrow mix of research depth and shipping experience.
Do you recruit executives as well as engineers?
Yes. Retained executive search for C-suite, VP and Head-of roles, and specialist search for senior engineers and technical leads.
Wayne Lindor
PRINCIPAL | PRIZED
HireAIEngineers.com is the AI engineering specialist division of Prized, placing niche engineering talent with the companies building the AI era, across AI Engineering, Robotics & Physical AI, and Liquid Cooling & Data Center Infrastructure.
Wayne heads up our AI Engineering practice, 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. If you need a shortlist of strong candidates quickly, or want to talk through your hiring strategy, get in touch below.
Let's talk
Tell us what you're building and where the gap is. A brief scoping call gives you a read on the market, an honest view of whether the role is hirable as written, and a clear next step.