An AI Engineer builds and maintains the systems around a language model and takes them to production. We help you hire one: AI sources and scores profiles, a senior engineer validates every finalist, and the first candidate usually arrives within 1–2 weeks. You pay only if you hire.
Tell us which AI Engineer you needThe title covers at least four different jobs, from the model to the business. We pin it down with you before the search opens: if you need to train or adapt the model itself, you want an ML Engineer; if the problem is that the model knows nothing about your business, an LLM Application Engineer; if nobody controls which models get called or what they cost, an AI Platform Engineer; if a process has to be automated and understanding it matters as much as the code, a Forward-Deployed / AI Product Engineer.
01 Model
ML Engineer
Trains and adapts models: labelling the data, fine-tuning, and judging when that beats calling a large model. The path every roadmap describes and almost nobody hires for.
02 Platform
AI Platform Engineer
The internal tooling for everyone who builds: where the calls go, what they cost, and what happens when they fail.
03 Application
LLM Application Engineer
Product on top of somebody else's model. Never touches it. Builds everything around it so it answers with the company's own data: searching the documents and handing the model only the parts it needs.
04 Business
Forward-Deployed / AI Product Engineer
Inside the client's business. Understanding the process counts for as much as writing the code.
It cuts across all four. It means measuring how often the system answers badly, against a fixed set of cases. Between half and seven in ten Spanish job ads for the role name it, depending on where you draw the line on what counts as evaluation.
The median band midpoint is €52,500 a year, and the middle half of job ads sits between €44,250 and €63,750. For the same title, a product company pays €69,000 and an IT services firm €49,400: a €19,600 gap.
The sample is small: of 476 job ads for the role posted in Spain between 27 July and 18 September 2026, only 31 publish a salary band. We explain it in what an AI Engineer earns in Spain.
Of 5,980 technical profiles in Spain that declare generative-AI skills, 85.8% do not carry AI Engineer in their title. And of more than 1,800 who do, only 2.3% show up as open to work.
The candidate you want is usually employed and under another title, often software engineer. So we search by what they have built and write to them directly. The data is in who holds AI Engineer jobs today.
A senior engineer reviews every finalist against the actual job: whether they have taken a system built on language models to production, how they measure when it answers badly, and which of the four jobs they fit. Fine-tuning is rare in Spain: only 2.9% of profiles with the title declare it, so if you need it you will know from day one.
We start with the brief: stack, seniority, team context and what has to happen for the hire to work. Our AI agents search LinkedIn, GitHub, the open web, proprietary databases, our network and tech communities at once, and score every profile against that brief.
Then a senior engineer validates each finalist by hand: technical skill, real level for the role, how they work with AI and fit with your team. AI proposes and a person decides. You get 1–3 finalists ready to interview, not 30 CVs.
The first validated candidate usually arrives within 1–2 weeks. Pace depends on the role and the brief, but you do not wait a month to see the first profile.
We charge 15–20% of first-year gross salary, on signing, and only if you hire. No retainer and no upfront fees. Every hire comes with a 3-month guarantee.