Smerdoff
Smerdoff / Hire

Hire AI Developers Who Ship Production LLM Products

Most "AI developers" have built a demo chatbot in a weekend. We work in RAG pipelines, AI agents, and automation that runs inside real businesses — with the logging, cost controls, and fallback logic a demo never needs. Vetted, NDA-first, and fast to start.

RAGAI AgentsLLM IntegrationNDA-FirstFixed Scope
$287,500
true first-year cost of a $150k in-house developer once fees, ramp-up and lost productivity are counted
Full Scale
30–50%
lower cost of a dedicated senior team vs an equivalent in-house US hire — with faster ramp-up
Full Scale

Why hire AI developers through Smerdoff instead of a solo freelancer

AI features fail quietly — a chatbot that hallucinates or an agent that loops isn't a bug you'll catch in a five-minute demo.

Production experience, not demo experience

Every engineer has shipped AI features that handle real user traffic, not just a proof of concept that worked once.

Fixed-scope estimates

You get a defined deliverable and price before work starts — not an open-ended hourly clock on an experimental feature.

US time-zone overlap

Enough working-hours overlap for daily standups and fast decisions, instead of a 12-hour async lag on every question.

NDA and IP protection built in

Your prompts, data, and model architecture stay yours — signed before any technical discussion starts.

Specialized roles, not generalists

LLM engineers, RAG developers, and AI agent specialists — matched to what your project actually needs, not a one-size-fits-all hire.

Start in days, not months

A defined scoping call and proposal process instead of a recruiting cycle that takes six weeks before anyone writes code.

Specialized AI roles available

Every AI project needs a different mix of skills — here's how we typically staff one.

LLM engineers

Retrieval, fine-tuning, and agent orchestration for production-grade AI systems.

RAG developers

Retrieval-augmented pipelines that ground answers in your actual documents and data.

Chatbot developers

Custom AI chatbots for support, sales, and internal tools — not a templated widget.

LangChain / agent developers

Multi-step AI agents that call tools, APIs, and your internal systems.

Generative AI developers

Custom GenAI features built on OpenAI, Claude, or open-source models.

ML engineers

Custom model training and deployment when off-the-shelf APIs aren't enough.

FAQ

It depends on scope — a single chatbot integration costs far less than a production RAG system with fine-tuning and monitoring. We give a fixed-scope estimate after a short discovery call rather than a blanket hourly rate.

In-house makes sense once AI is core to your product and you need someone iterating on it daily long-term. For a defined feature or a first AI product, an outside team gets you to production faster without a six-figure annual commitment.

Beyond calling an API: retrieval and embedding design, prompt evaluation, cost and latency tradeoffs, and knowing when fine-tuning is actually worth it versus better retrieval.

Most engagements start within one to two weeks of the scoping call, once we've defined the deliverable and matched the right specialists to your project.

Yes, NDAs are standard before any technical discussion. You own all code, prompts, and models built for your project — no licensing-back arrangements.

Related

Get a free AI consultation

Tell us what you want AI to do in your product — we'll scope the right team and a fixed estimate within 48 hours.