Hire
AI Research Engineers

A AI Research Engineer typically costs $29,900/mo – $40,450/mo in total monthly compensation for a senior hire working remotely, with an upward skew for US-based and executive roles. On top of base, budget 10–25% for equity or bonus and roughly 15–20% fully-loaded overhead. Exzev charges a flat placement fee, not a percentage — pricing is transparent and shared upfront.

First shortlist lands in 48 hours. Most AI Research Engineer searches close between two and six weeks end-to-end, versus a market average of roughly 90 days for this role and location. The main drivers are interview throughput on your side and how tightly scoped the brief is — we guide both before sourcing starts.

A senior AI Research Engineer has productionized models under real latency and cost constraints — not notebooks. Mid-level engineers fine-tune and evaluate. For GenAI and ML platform work, seniority maps directly to inference cost, retrieval quality and eval discipline. Mid-level AI Research Engineers in senior seats usually ship a demo, not a product.

A full-time AI Research Engineer makes sense once the work is continuous and headcount-justified. For early-stage or one-off builds (a single product, a migration, an audit), a fractional or contract AI Research Engineer is usually more efficient. Ask one question: will this person be fully utilized inside six months?

Yes. Our active talent pool for this role spans roughly 150 pre-vetted candidates across 30+ countries, most of them comfortable with async-first or overlap-based remote setups. We match candidates to your working hours, location preferences (EU, US, UAE) and compliance constraints (EoR, contractor, local entity) before they reach your shortlist.

Every AI Research Engineer candidate runs a live system-design session, a code review of a real PR, and a take-home bounded to four hours. We reject 80%+ before you ever see a CV. You only interview engineers who have shipped the same stack to production at a similar-stage company.