Guides · carbon.talent

How to hire a contract AI engineer

Last updated 26 Oct 2026

Hire a contract AI engineer when you have a defined AI outcome, such as one LLM feature or a retrieval prototype, and a fixed term. Write the outcome and acceptance criteria, assess shipped work, agree the rate and handover, then post your role free.

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Step by step

  1. Define one outcome. For example: a support assistant that answers from your help centre, behind an evaluation set.
  2. Write acceptance criteria. Agree the evaluation set, quality bar, latency, cost and guardrails before work starts.
  3. State term and access. Contract length, hours, overlap and which systems and data they can access.
  4. Assess shipped work. Ask for a walk-through of a feature they shipped and how they measured quality.
  5. Plan the handover. Code in your repositories, documentation and a runbook your team can own.

Pay and rates

Set a range from official public data. See our rates and salary guide, which links only to BLS and ONS sources.

Post your role free

When the brief is ready, post your role free on carbon.talent and review vetted profiles.

Questions companies ask

When should I hire a contract AI engineer?
When the outcome is defined and time-boxed, such as a prototype or one production feature, and you do not yet need a full-time AI team.
How do I judge an AI engineer quickly?
Ask how they evaluated a feature they shipped: the test set, failure cases and what they changed as a result.