# Hire an AI Engineer | $15–35/hr

> Hire a dedicated AI engineer for $15–35 per hour. Agents, RAG pipelines, and LLM integration built to production standard by a vetted Sentient Arc engineer.

Hiring a dedicated AI engineer through Sentient Arc costs $15–35 per hour, depending on system complexity and seniority. Agents, RAG systems, and LLM integration, embedded in your team, starting with a free consultation.

## Rate & engagement
- **Rate:** $15–35/hr
- **Engagement:** Part-time or full-time
- **Start:** Within 1 week
- **Overlap:** 4+ hrs your timezone

## The AI demo is easy. The system is not.
Anyone can wire a model to a prompt and impress a meeting. Getting the same feature to survive real users takes retrieval that stays grounded, tool calls that fail safely, evals that catch drift, and costs that stay sane at volume.

That skill set is scarce and expensive to hire full-time. An embedded AI engineer gives you production-grade judgment now, at an hourly rate, without a six-month search.

## Evals before vibes
Every AI feature gets a definition of correct before it gets a bigger prompt: an eval set, confidence thresholds, and human-in-the-loop gates where the stakes are high. We measure, then iterate.

The engineer is model-agnostic, typically working across Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini behind a typed tool layer, so your product depends on contracts you own rather than one vendor API shape.

## What they own
- **AI agents**: Task-running agents with explicit state, tool contracts, and escalation paths, not open loops.
- **RAG systems**: Retrieval pipelines that answer from your documents with citations: chunking, indexing, reranking.
- **LLM integration**: Model calls wired into product features with structured outputs, fallbacks, and cost controls.
- **Evals & observability**: Eval suites, tracing, and quality dashboards so behavior changes are caught before users see them.

## Stack
- **Models & SDKs:** Claude SDK, OpenAI SDK, Gemini SDK, LangGraph
- **Systems:** RAG pipelines, Agents, Tool calling, Evals, Guardrails
- **Runtime:** Node.js, Python, Postgres, Vector stores, Queues

## FAQ
**How much does it cost to hire an AI engineer?**

You can hire a dedicated AI engineer from Sentient Arc for $15–35 per hour, depending on project complexity and seniority. A free consultation scopes the system before you commit.

**Can I hire an AI engineer for a RAG or agent project?**

Yes, those are the two most common engagements: RAG systems that answer from your documents with citations, and agents that retrieve context, call tools, and verify their own work.

**Which models do your AI engineers work with?**

They are model-agnostic: typically Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini behind a typed tool layer, chosen per task for quality, latency, and cost rather than by default.

**How is this different from hiring a prompt engineer?**

Prompting is a fraction of the job. An AI engineer builds the system around the model: retrieval, tool contracts, evals, guardrails, and observability, which is what makes the feature survive production.

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Canonical page: https://www.sentientarc.com/hire/ai-engineer