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Hire AI Engineer · Seattle

Hire an AI Engineer
in Seattle

LLM features that ship, with evals so they don't drift.

Hiring an AI engineer in Seattle? 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.

Local senior, year 1

$479K all-in

Base + benefits + payroll tax + 90-day hire cycle

Engagement with us

$8,000+

Flat price, 2–5 weeks to first deploy

Start with a 30-min callSee the AI Product Development page

Two paths for ai engineer work

Hire local in Seattle, or engage us

Path A · Hire local

~$479K

Year-one outlay for one senior ai engineer

  • 60–90 day search through recruiters / inbound
  • Vesting equity, signing bonus, relocation if remote
  • One person, full-time, no flexibility on capacity
  • Probation period: 90 days of unknown output
  • If it doesn't work out: severance, recruiting cycle restarts

Path B · Engage Start Matter

From $8,000

Quoted after a 30-minute call

  • 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 — output you can ship to users
  • Hand off cleanly when you hire your full-time team

What we do

The work, concretely

What you'd hand to a salaried ai engineer — we own end to end on a flat-price engagement.

  • 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'd use

What we'd build with

Vercel AI SDKAI GatewayAnthropic ClaudeOpenAIpgvectorInngest

FAQ

About hiring vs engaging in Seattle

How fast can you start?

+
Most engagements begin within seven days of the first call. There's no recruiter pipeline, no notice period, no relocation timeline.

Which model provider?

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Default to Anthropic Claude (Sonnet most cases, Haiku for cost-sensitive paths, Opus for the hard ones). All routed via Vercel AI Gateway so you can switch without code changes.

Is this a full-time replacement?

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No — we're a senior engineer on a flat-price engagement. For most pre-seed and seed-stage products, that ships more than a salaried hire would in the same window. When you outgrow it, we hand off cleanly to the team you hire.

How do you handle hallucinations?

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Evals on a held-out test set in CI, citation-required prompts where factuality matters, structured outputs (JSON schema) where machine-parsable answers are needed.

Who owns the code?

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You do, from commit one. Repo in your GitHub, infra in your cloud account. When you do hire someone, they onboard onto your code, not ours.

Other roles in Seattle

We also embed as

AI Engineer elsewhere

Same role, other cities

Ready to ship instead of hire?

30-minute call → flat-price quote in 24 hours → first deploy inside two weeks.

Start the callSee Seattle overview