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02 — ENGINEERS FOR HIRE

AI engineers you can afford to start with.

Full-time engineers across Southeast Asia who already work in Claude Code, Cursor, and the rest of the toolchain — billed monthly, no placement fee. Shortlist in 72 hours, a paid trial week before you commit, and thirty days' notice if it stops working. If you found the person yourself, we can be their employer of record instead.

72 HOURS
From intake call to a shortlist with code you can read.
5 MARKETS
Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
ONE INVOICE
Salary, payroll, taxes, equipment, and compliance in a single monthly figure.

Two ways to do it

We find and manage the engineer, or you bring your own and we handle the employment. Both are fixed monthly fees, and both can stop.

MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION

Engineer on monthly

$3,400/ engineer / mo

A full-time, pre-vetted engineer, managed by us and billed as one monthly figure.

WHAT'S INCLUDED
  • The engineer's full salary, payroll, and taxes
  • Compliant employment in-country, EOR included
  • Equipment and the tool licences they work in
  • A named partner here who is not a salesperson
  • One monthly invoice, no hourly timesheets
GUARANTEES
  • Paid trial week before you commit
  • Replacement within a week if it is not working
  • 30 days' notice to stop, rolling monthly
  • IP assigns to you, NDAs signed on day one
  • No placement fee and no upfront fee
Request a shortlist
EMPLOYER OF RECORD

EOR

$149/ employee / mo

You picked the person yourself. We become their legal employer so you do not have to open an entity.

WHAT'S INCLUDED
  • Legal employment in-country, no local entity needed
  • Employment contracts and onboarding
  • Payroll processing and statutory filings
  • Benefits administration
  • Tax and compliance reporting
GUARANTEES
  • IP and confidentiality assigned to you
  • No upfront fee
  • Cancel with standard notice
Ask about EOR

Roles and rates

Monthly rates for a full-time engineer, all in. The AI-native roles at the top are the ones people actually ask us for now.

Role
What they do
Level
From
AI Engineer
RAG, agent workflows, evals, tool integration
Mid
$4,200/mo
AI Engineer
Owns a use case end to end, mentors your team
Senior
$7,400/mo
AI Agent Developer
Multi-step agents, tool use, and the guardrails around them
Mid–Senior
$5,200/mo
LLM Engineer
Fine-tuning, serving, and the eval loop around a model
Senior
$6,800/mo
ML Engineer
Training, fine-tuning, feature pipelines, serving
Mid–Senior
$5,600/mo
MLOps Engineer
Serving, monitoring, and cost and latency in production
Senior
$6,400/mo
Forward Deployed Engineer
Sits with your customer, ships the integration, feeds it back
Senior
$8,200/mo
Data Engineer
The pipelines your AI plan quietly depends on
Mid
$3,900/mo
Workflow Automation Engineer
n8n, Temporal, and the plumbing between your systems
Mid
$3,900/mo
AI Solutions Architect
Model routing, cost design, platform decisions
Principal
$11,000/mo
Eval & QA Engineer
Test sets, regression suites, red-teaming
Mid
$3,400/mo
Data Annotation Specialist
Labelled data for training sets and eval sets
Junior–Mid
$1,900/mo
Rates are per engineer, per month, full time, and vary by market and seniority. Part time from 60%. Volume of three or more, talk to us.

Where they sit

Southeast Asia, working the overlap you agree with them rather than a token hour at the end of your day. English is checked in the interview, not assumed from a CV.

Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh City · Hanoi
Philippines
Manila · Cebu
Indonesia
Jakarta
Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur
Singapore
Singapore

What happens before you see a name

Every engineer on a shortlist has been through all four of these against your stack. Nobody reaches you on the strength of a CV.

  • A coding test set against your stack, not a generic puzzle
  • A peer interview with an engineer who does the job themselves
  • Reference and role checks on what they actually owned
  • A recorded walkthrough of real work, and repositories you can read

Three steps, one week

STEP 01

Intake call, 30 minutes

Stack, use case, seniority, and how you want to work. No job spec required.

STEP 02

Shortlist in 72 hours

Two or three engineers with real repositories to read and a short recorded walkthrough of their work.

STEP 03

Paid trial week

A scoped piece of your real backlog. Keep the work either way; continue monthly only if it was good.

Why it costs less than a local hire

Our engineers work remotely from lower-cost markets, they are paid well for those markets, and we take a thin margin instead of a recruiter's fee. That is the whole trick — there is no junior-in-a-senior-costume arrangement.

You read their code before the trial week. If the work is not good, you keep what was built and owe nothing further.

THROUGH BEACONAI
$3,400$11,000
/ engineer / mo, all in

Salary, payroll, taxes, equipment, and compliant employment in one invoice.

THE SAME HIRE, LOCALLY
$13,000$26,000
/ engineer / mo, all in

Local-hire figures are all-in: salary plus employer taxes, benefits, equipment, recruiter fee, and desk overhead.

Tell us the stack, get a shortlist Thursday.

Request a shortlist