Hire AI engineers who have shipped this before

What "AI engineer" should mean for your job

For business automation work, the engineers worth hiring cluster into a few real specialisms: generative AI and LLM engineers (models wired into tools, retrieval and guardrails), integration engineers (your CRM, ERP and inboxes talking to the model layer), data and pipeline engineers, and applied ML engineers for the rarer custom-model cases. A single job usually needs one of these, occasionally two. It almost never needs a "full-stack AI generalist", which is the profile generalist marketplaces will show you most.

The screening bar that actually predicts success

Rate cards do not predict outcomes; shipped work does. When Botgigs vets an engineer, the bar is evidence of production automation: what ran, at what volume, what broke in month two, and how they knew when the system was wrong. You can apply the same bar yourself this week, the exact questions are in the 2026 hiring playbook. Market rates for engineers who pass that bar are in the cost guide: roughly $60 to $150 per hour for solid specialists, more for production agent-systems experience.

Scope first, then match

Hiring an AI engineer without a scope is how budgets die in discovery. Describe your automation in plain language in the hire-brief generator and you get the scope in about twenty seconds: deliverables, milestones, the exact role and skills to screen for, and an honest effort band. Sometimes the brief will tell you something a staffing pitch never will: that your job does not need an engineer at all, because a working agent already solves it.

Where Botgigs is today

Honest status: early access, launching soon. The demo intake is live and free; matching against the vetted bench opens at launch, with planned pricing already published so there are no surprises. Join the early-access list and your brief is first in the queue when the board opens. Teams that need SSO, invoicing and a DPA should look at the Enterprise plan and reach out via "Talk to sales".