Matched to your stack in about a week. Vetted for the work, never swapped for someone cheaper. How we vet →

Hire Talent·By Discipline·AI / ML

Hire AI Engineers.

Engineers who command AI. Not dabble with it.

Senior AI / ML engineers embedded in your team through staff augmentation. The hardest hire in 2026. The shape of the role has changed faster than any other discipline , and the best AI engineers shipped before the boom, not because of it.

What they do

The work, in practice.

AI engineers at Lateral build production retrieval systems, eval harnesses, supervised agent stacks, and fine-tuned models. They understand inference economics. They’ve put models through audits. They know which problems don’t need an LLM.

Common stacks

The tools of the trade.

PythonPyTorchJAXLangGraphLlamaIndexOpenAI / Anthropic SDKsvLLMTritonRayMONAIWeights & BiasespgvectorPineconeModal

From the network

People, not profiles.

Current network members, anonymised to protect their next move.

Diego A. · Senior ML / AI Engineer

8 YRS · Buenos Aires · UTC−3

Built an eval-first agent stack for a Series B copilot. 96% gold-set pass.

PyTorchvLLMLangGraphModal

Priya R. · Staff Applied Scientist

11 YRS · Bangalore · UTC+5:30

Took a medical-imaging model from research to FDA 510(k) submission.

PythonJAXTritonpgvector

Kateryna V. · Senior LLM Engineer

6 YRS · Lisbon · UTC+0

Shipped a multi-agent dispatch tool replacing six legacy services.

OpenAIAnthropicLangGraphModal

How you engage them

One person, or the whole shape.

Why hire through Lateral

Three reasons engineering leaders choose us.

  • 01Top 1%, vetted by engineers, not recruiters. Every AI / ML candidate is reviewed by a senior in the same discipline. No keyword matching, no leetcode.
  • 02Matched in 7 days, in your time zone. We do not place engineers more than about four hours off your business day.
  • 03Transparent pricing. 60 / 25 / 15: most of what you pay reaches the engineer. See the terms.

FAQ

Honest answers, common questions.

How do you screen for AI fluency vs. just "Python on a resume"?
Every AI candidate ships a live evaluation: a real retrieval task, a real agent loop, a real eval harness. The submissions are reviewed by engineers. Not recruiters.
Can your AI engineers take a model through FDA / regulatory submission?
Yes. We’ve done it. Ezra Flash was a Lateral build with a 510(k) clearance in 2023. Ask us for the playbook.
What about cost / inference economics?
It’s the first conversation we have. Most teams under-estimate inference costs by 3–5x at scale. Our engineers cost-model before they prototype.

Hire AI / ML talent.

Tell us the role. A vetted shortlist by next week, in your time zone.

Work with LateralEngineers · Teams · Entire builds
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