Hire AI Engineer · New York
Hire an AI Engineer
in New York
LLM features that ship, with evals so they don't drift.
Hiring an AI engineer in New York? Senior ML / LLM engineers run $300K+ here and the pipeline is shallow. We ship AI features instead — chat UI, RAG, agents, evals — on a flat-price engagement that goes live in 2–5 weeks.
New York · AI Engineer
Hire local, year 1
~$479K
Base + benefits + payroll tax. 60–90 day search.
Engage us
$8,000+
2–5 weeks to first deploy.
7d
Start vs 60d hire
0%
Equity, signing, severance risk
The local read
Why hiring a ai engineer in New York is hard
NYC founders have a worse hiring problem than the funding headlines suggest. Half your top engineering candidates are weighing your seed offer against a $400K Google package. The dev shops in town are agency-of-record operations billing hourly, or staffing shops shoveling juniors into your team.
We're neither. One named senior engineer owns the build end-to-end. Flat price quoted after a 30-minute call. Eastern Time, same as your General Catalyst partner and your midtown customers. When we finish, the code is in your GitHub and the contract is over. No retainer.
A senior ai engineer here is a ~$479K year-one outlay after benefits, payroll tax, and the 60–90 day search. We're a $8,000+ flat engagement that starts inside seven days.
Did you know · New York
NYC has roughly 25,000 active tech startups, second only to the Bay Area in the US.
Time zone
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ET
Eastern Time, same as you. Meetings happen during your morning coffee, not midnight Slack pings.
Sectors in New York
Why this beats a hire
One AI-native engineer.
The output of a team.
One senior ai engineer plus AI agents now ships what four engineers used to. Same code quality, half the cost, three-week timelines instead of three months. Built for pre-seed to Series A founders in New York who need to ship before the next round closes.
Two paths in New York
Hire a ai engineer,
or engage us
Same outcome, different routes. The local hire path takes 60–90 days and locks $250K+ for year one. We're a flat-price engagement that starts inside seven days.
Path A · Hire local
~$479Kyear one
One senior ai engineer in New York, fully loaded
- ·60–90 day search through recruiters and inbound
- ·Equity, signing bonus, potential relocation
- ·Full-time only — no flexibility on capacity
- ·90-day probation of unknown output
- ·Bad fit means severance and a fresh recruiting cycle
Path B · Engage Start Matter
$8,000+flat
Quoted after a 30-minute call · 2–5 weeks
- Senior engineer starts inside seven days
- No equity, no signing bonus, no recruiting fee
- Flexible capacity — scope up or down between phases
- First deploy in two weeks — shippable output, not a slide deck
- Hand off cleanly when you hire your team — your code, your repo
The work, concretely
What we'd own day to day
The same scope you'd hand to a salaried ai engineer, owned end to end on a flat-price engagement. No coordination overhead, no junior-on-the-bench, no estimation theatre.
- Chat / agent UI with streaming, interrupt, retry, citations done right
- RAG: chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, citation-required prompts
- Multi-provider routing via Vercel AI Gateway — primary + fallback + cost rules
- Evals as a CI gate, not a vibe check — held-out test set, regression alerts
- Cost observability — token spend per route, model tiering, caching
Stack we use
Defaults — we deviate when the project demands it, not because something is fashionable.
AI Engineer work we've shipped
Real founders, real shipped product
Instead of hiring one ai engineer who needs to ramp, you get senior work like this — from founders in New York we've actually shipped with.
Sweet and Savory Meals
Homemade recipes blog and e-commerce platform for food lovers. Easy and delicious dishes with integrated recipe management and shopping features.
Visit the product
Brain.fm
Music platform designed to help focus, relax, and sleep better. AI-generated music optimized for cognitive performance and mental wellness.
Visit the productDeeper reads
More on hiring vs engaging from our blog
Long-form on pricing, AI-native engineering, why we don't take equity, and what shipping looks like in 2026.
FAQ
About hiring vs engaging in New York
How fast can you start?
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Which model provider?
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Is this a full-time replacement?
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How do you handle hallucinations?
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Who owns the code?
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Got a question about working with us from New York?
Ask me anything.
Right now.
Real chat. Real answers from our FAQ. If I don't have a clean match, I'll email you back within a day.
Time zone
--:--:--
ET
Eastern Time, same as you. Meetings happen during your morning coffee, not midnight Slack pings.
Valery Satsura
CEO · Start Matter · usually replies in minutes
Hey, I'm Valery. Ask me anything about working with us from New York.
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Ready when you are
Ship instead of hire.
30-minute call → flat-price quote in 24 hours → first deploy inside two weeks. No equity ask, no notice period, no recruiting fee.