Hire AI developers who ship AI features on your team
Senior developers who wire LLM APIs, retrieval and agents into your existing web and mobile apps, working your hours and shipping to your users.
By the Ryz Labs team · Updated October 2026
Ryz places senior, top 1% AI developers on your team for $7,000 to $15,000 per engineer per month, and you meet named candidates before you sign. They add LLM features, RAG and agents to the web and mobile apps you already run, on US business hours.
What our AI developers work on
An AI developer starts from your product, not from a model, and ships inside the app, API and database you have today. Common projects:
- Adding a natural language search or "ask your data" box to a SaaS dashboard, with answers grounded in the customer's own records.
- Summaries, drafting and classification features in existing React, Next.js or mobile apps, streamed from the Anthropic or OpenAI APIs through your backend.
- RAG over help centers, product docs and internal wikis, using pgvector in the Postgres you already run.
- Agents that take actions in your app, such as filing a ticket, updating a CRM record or scheduling, with typed tool schemas and user confirmation steps.
- Copilot-style assistants inside admin tools, with per-tenant permissions and audit logs.
- Usage metering, per-customer cost limits and feature flags for staged rollouts.
For dedicated AI engineering roles focused on evaluation and AI systems themselves, see hire AI engineers.
What happens after you ask for AI developers
Talk covers your stack, your users, the feature and what data it can touch. Match brings a written scope, a price and the AI developers we would assign, chosen for experience in your frameworks. At Join they get your repos, staging, feature flag tool and API keys for the model providers you approve. Grow might add a second developer or an AI pod. If a developer is not the right fit, we replace them free, and you own all the code and IP they produce.
Skills we vet for
- Full-stack product engineering. TypeScript and Python, React or mobile front ends, REST and GraphQL APIs.
- LLM API integration. Streaming responses to the UI, tool calling, structured outputs, retries, timeouts and graceful fallbacks when a provider is slow.
- Retrieval in an existing database. Embeddings in Postgres with pgvector, hybrid keyword plus vector search and tenant-aware filtering.
- Agent patterns in apps. Bounded tool sets, confirmation before writes, idempotent actions and readable traces of what the agent did.
- AI UX. Partial states, clickable citations, editable drafts and a way to report bad answers.
- Testing AI features. Small eval sets per feature, snapshot tests for prompts and CI checks that catch regressions after a model change.
- Cost and privacy. Prompt caching, token budgets per account, PII redaction and keeping customer data in your cloud.
How we vet AI developers
Recruiters look for developers who have shipped AI features to real users inside an existing product, then check what they owned. ARC, our in-house ranking system, orders the pipeline. Candidates complete structured NTRVSTA AI interviews on app integration, retrieval and failure handling. Recruiters review each candidate before and after and send a curated shortlist. AI scores are advisory. People make the decisions.
Sample interview topics
- You add an AI summary button to a page that already loads in 800 ms. How do you stream the result without blocking the page, and what does the user see if the model times out?
- A multi-tenant SaaS app needs RAG over each customer's documents. How do you guarantee one tenant's chunks never appear in another tenant's answer?
- An agent can create invoices in your billing system. What guardrails, confirmation steps and idempotency keys do you add before it ships?
- A model upgrade makes your extraction feature return a field in a new format. How would your tests have caught it before customers did?
- AI spend on one large customer spiked this week. How do you find the cause and cap it without breaking the feature?
One AI developer or an AI pod on your team?
| Question | One AI developer on your team | An AI pod on your team |
|---|
| What it fits | Adding AI features to a product you already ship | Building a new AI system, such as a review engine or agent, end to end |
| Who leads | Your engineering lead sets priorities | A pod tech lead runs delivery and reports to your leads |
| Team shape | One senior developer working your backlog | Often around seven senior engineers, including a tech lead, ML engineer and backend engineers |
| Scope | Feature by feature, sprint by sprint | A defined system with a plan and milestones agreed up front |
| How work shows up | Pull requests and releases in your normal cadence | Weekly demos plus code in your repos and cloud |
| When to switch | When AI work outgrows one person's backlog | When the system is live and your team can own it with fewer people |
Ways to hire AI developers
| Option | Best for | Trade-offs |
|---|
| Freelance marketplace | A proof of concept or a single chatbot widget | Demos are hard to verify. Hardening and continuity are on you. |
| Staffing or recruiting agency | Filling a permanent AI role | "AI" on a resume covers prompt tinkering to research. Few recruiters can test it. |
| In-house recruiting | A long-term owner of AI in your product | Long searches for a role many companies want at once. |
| Ryz Labs staff augmentation | Adding a senior AI developer to an existing product team | You set priorities and review code. Works best with a clear feature roadmap. |
| Ryz Labs AI pod team | A larger AI system built in your stack | A dedicated multi-person pod, planned as a team before it starts. |
Ryz is not the right fit if you want a self-serve marketplace for hourly gigs, developers in European or Asian time zones, or an AI platform you license instead of build.
AI developers for hire: one developer, remote or a pod
Companies come to us to hire an AI developer for one feature, or to hire AI developers for a whole roadmap. Both work. Our AI developers for hire are remote and keep your hours, and if you want to hire dedicated AI developers who stay on one product for the long run, we scope it that way. Teams that hire an artificial intelligence developer usually start with one feature, then grow.
Why hire AI developers from Latin America
AI features change fast after launch: odd answers, prompt tweaks, cost spikes. Our developers work on US business hours, so a bad answer flagged at 10 a.m. can be fixed and tested the same day.
Many senior engineers in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Colombia built web and mobile products for years before AI features arrived, which is the background this role needs.
Production proof: AI review in a regulated workflow
A pod of our engineers built a marketing compliance review system for a leading alternative asset manager. It checks each document section against internal rule sets with embeddings and an LLM, flagging missing disclaimers, unqualified claims and jurisdiction issues. It handles 8,000+ marketing documents a year, and review that took days now takes hours. The stack included Anthropic and OpenAI models and Azure. Wiring that review into tools staff already use is AI developer work.
AI developer hiring kit
Related roles
FAQ
Should I hire a freelance AI developer or an AI pod?
A freelance AI developer can suit a throwaway prototype. For features customers depend on, a senior AI developer on your team or an AI pod gives you vetting, continuity and accountability after launch.
What is the difference between an AI developer and an AI engineer?
Our AI developers focus on putting AI into your existing product: UI, APIs and data. AI engineers focus more deeply on retrieval quality, evaluation and AI systems themselves. Many teams need both, and we can staff either.
How much does it cost to hire AI developers?
$7,000 to $15,000 per engineer per month, scoped per team. Before you sign, you see a plan, a price and the names of the developers who would do the work.
What hours do your AI developers work?
US business hours, including New York hours. Ryz engineers work on your team, reporting to your leads. Talk to us to scope your team.
Questions we didn't answer? Email info@ryzlabs.com.