AI Engineer Recruitment

Companies hiring AI engineers usually want the same thing: someone who can take a model from a promising demo to something that works in front of real users. Consortia recruits AI engineers for SaaS, data and platform businesses on permanent and contract terms across the UK, Europe, the US and the UAE.

The title covers a wide range of work. Most AI engineering hires are applied software engineering: connecting large language models to a product through APIs, retrieval and evaluation, then making the result fast and reliable enough to ship. Where the work is closer to training and serving models, the hire is usually a machine learning engineer. We agree which version of the role you need before we search, then assess candidates on that basis rather than on a list of AI keywords.

How we recruit AI engineers

Many roles we recruit are founding or early hires, building a product with a small team. We are direct about what that means: funding, runway, equity, long hours and often five days in the office. Some candidates decide on the first call it is not for them, which saves everyone time.

For early roles, we often ask candidates to describe, in writing and in their own words, a project they took from idea to production. It shows how they think about data, trade-offs and ownership. It also gives founders something more useful than a CV.

We want to hear about production work: what they built, how they handled cost and reliability, and how they use AI tools day to day. Engineers from large tech companies can do well here. We check they are ready for the pace of a small team.

Some early-stage clients have no fixed band and trade base salary against equity. We take candidates' expectations for base and total pay separately, so both sides can see where an offer could land.