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Senior engineers
In your repo and standups.
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Monthly terms
Stop with 2 weeks' notice.
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No hiring process
No recruiters. No notice periods.
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You own the code
100% of the IP, day one.
To hire AI developers in 2026, look for software engineers who have shipped LLM features to real users: retrieval over real data, tool-calling agents with limits, evaluation sets that catch regressions, guardrails against prompt injection and per-request cost tracking. Industry data puts LLM integration into an existing product at about $15–60k over 3–8 weeks. Yarify provides senior AI engineers monthly with 2 weeks' notice, or as fixed-price builds.
Why AI projects stall
The demo
- Ten hand-picked examples
- Confident wrong answers
- Nobody knows if a prompt got better
- Surprise bill at month end
The production feature
- An evaluation set agreed up front
- Citations and an allowed I don't know
- Regressions caught in CI
- Token budgets per feature and customer
What our AI developers build
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LLM features in your product
Summaries, drafting, extraction from documents, classification. Built into your app, not bolted on as a chat bubble.
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RAG over your data
Structure-aware chunking, hybrid search, reranking, citations. Postgres with pgvector before a new database.
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Agents with limits
Scoped tools, every action logged, human approval where mistakes are expensive.
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Cost and latency control
Model routing, prompt caching, batch APIs, spend dashboards per feature.
Hiring takes months. We start building.
Hiring a developer
- Job post & sourcing
- Interviews
- Notice period
- Onboarding
- Building
Yarify
- Call + fixed quote
- Building + weekly demos
- Live. Iterating with users.
Illustrative timeline. In-house hiring usually spends months on sourcing, interviews and notice periods before the first commit.
How an AI engagement runs
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Is AI even the answer? · First call
Sometimes a rules engine or a better form does it for a tenth of the cost. We say so.
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Define success first · Week 1
30 to 100 real examples with expected outputs. That set becomes the evaluation.
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Ship a thin slice · Next weeks
One workflow end to end: data, model call, validation, UI, logging, cost tracking.
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Harden and expand · Ongoing
Guardrails, fallbacks, monitoring, more workflows, each measured against the eval set.
Guardrails we build in
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Prompt-injection defence
Untrusted text never gives orders.
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PII redaction
Before data leaves your system.
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Schema-checked output
Validated before anything uses it.
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Human approval
Where a mistake costs money.
How to hire an AI developer who ships
- Has shipped an LLM feature to real users and measured quality
- Builds an evaluation set before tuning prompts
- Can explain why retrieval failed, not only that it did
- Tracks cost per request and knows how to cut it
- Designs agents with scoped tools and step limits
- Can tell you when not to use an LLM
Interview questions for AI developers
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Did a prompt change make things worse?
An evaluation set, automatic scoring in CI, human spot checks. A few playground tries is a red flag.
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Our RAG bot gives confident wrong answers.
Retrieval first: chunking, missing documents, ranking. Then whether the prompt allows I don't know.
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An email contains instructions for the model.
Separate trusted instructions from untrusted content, limit tools, require approval for side effects.
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Cut our LLM bill in half.
Measure, route easy requests to smaller models, cache context, batch offline jobs, trim prompts.
AI developer rates by region
Hourly market bands from industry surveys. Not our price list: we quote after a free call.
| Region | Junior | Mid-level | Senior |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $70–100 | $100–140 | $140–200+ |
| Western Europe | $55–80 | $80–110 | $110–160 |
| Central & Eastern Europe | $30–45 | $45–60 | $60–80 |
| Latin America | $35–50 | $50–65 | $65–90 |
| South & Southeast Asia | $20–32 | $32–42 | $42–55 |
For AI work the rate is rarely the biggest line: data preparation, integration, testing and monitoring often cost more than the model. See AI development cost.
Try AI without betting the company.
Monthly with 2 weeks' notice, or a fixed-price build where overruns on our estimate are our cost. You own the code, prompts and evaluation sets from day one.
- One workflow first, behind a feature flag
- Provider-agnostic, so you can switch models
AI software we shipped
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Medical AI That Drafts. Clinicians Decide.
AI software for a hospital: LLM-drafted clinical documents and imaging-report text, mandatory clinician review, full audit logs, GDPR health-data handling and an on-prem or private-cloud deployment option.
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See Our Sofa in Your Living Room
AI virtual staging for a furniture retailer: catalogue ingestion, room analysis, perspective-aware placement of real products, generative compositing, shopper UI and lead capture.
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Cold Outreach That Stays Out of Spam
Custom cold outreach and email campaign platform: multi-step sequences, SPF/DKIM/DMARC checks, inbox warm-up and rotation, LLM-personalised first lines, reply detection and campaign analytics.
Questions buyers ask us
How much does it cost to hire an AI developer?
Senior developer market rates run about $60–80 per hour in Central and Eastern Europe and $140–200+ in the US. Per project, industry data puts LLM integration into an existing product at roughly $15–60k over 3–8 weeks; complex systems run $50–300k+.
AI developer or data scientist: who do I need?
A data scientist trains and analyses models. An AI developer is a software engineer who puts models into an application: data pipelines, retrieval, APIs, evaluation, guardrails, monitoring. Most products need the second first.
Which AI models and providers do you use?
Per use case: commercial APIs for quality, smaller or open-weight models where cost, latency or data residency matter. We design so you can switch providers without a rewrite, because prices and models change every quarter.
How do you handle medical or financial data?
Minimisation and redaction before anything reaches a model, providers with the right data-processing terms and regions, access logs, output validation. We built medical AI software for a hospital with clinician review on every output.
How do you stop the AI from making things up?
You can't eliminate it, but you can control it: retrieval with citations, prompts that allow I don't know, output validation, confidence thresholds that route to a human and an eval set that tracks the hallucination rate.
Can you add AI to our existing product?
Yes, it's the most common request. One workflow with clear value and measurable quality, shipped behind a feature flag, then expanded. Cheaper than a separate AI product. Need Python depth too? See Python developers.
Keep reading
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AI development
Production AI, not demos. LLM integration, RAG, document processing and AI features built with evaluations, human review and GDPR-aware data handling.
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Staff augmentation
Senior engineers embedded in your existing team: your repo, your standups, your tracker. Monthly billing, 2 weeks’ notice, and every line of code is yours.
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Augmentation vs dedicated team
Staff augmentation or a dedicated development team? Who manages the work, who owns delivery, monthly costs and a clear rule for choosing, with an illustrative example.
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Developer rates by country
Hourly software developer rates by country and seniority in 2026: US, Western Europe, Central & Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, with monthly costs and freelance benchmarks.
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Dedicated development team
A dedicated development team of 2–4 senior engineers working on your product. Monthly billing, cancel with 2 weeks’ notice, 100% of code and IP is yours.
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Python developers
Senior Python engineers for FastAPI and Django backends, data pipelines, LLM tooling and automation that touches money. Monthly augmentation or a fixed-price project.
From AI demo to AI feature
30 minutes with a senior AI engineer. Bring ten real examples of what the model should do.