Hire AI engineers who have already shipped agents into production.
Hiring for this is hard in a specific way: the CVs all say the same words, the interviews test the wrong things, and the good people are not looking. The alternative is to bring in a senior engineer who has done it, inside your team, on a term you can end — and to be able to judge them from written work before you ever get on a call.
A person, not a seat.
Four things you should be able to expect, and which most arrangements quietly do not give you.
One named senior engineer
You meet the person who will do the work on the first call, and that is the person who does it. No account manager in between, no substitution after signature.
- Eight years and up, out of big-tech and fintech teams
- In your Slack, your standups and your repository
- Accountable to you for decisions, not just for tickets
- Same engineer month to month, so context never resets
People who have shipped agents, not read about them
Agent work goes wrong in specific places: tool calls that fire twice, retrieval that ignores who is asking, evals that pass while the product regresses.
- Tool-use agents wired into real systems, with audit trails
- Retrieval scoped by tenant and permission, enforced below the query
- Evals and prompt regression tests that run in CI
- Tracing and cost per call, so spend is a decision not a surprise
The systems underneath the model
Most “AI problems” are ordinary backend problems wearing a new hat: state, queues, tenancy, migrations, and what happens when a provider is slow.
- Postgres, schema design and migrations that run without drama
- Queues and workers, with the state kept where it belongs
- Multi-tenant boundaries that hold when an agent composes the query
- Cloud, CI/CD and the on-call runbook a small team can actually operate
Built to be handed over
The aim is not to become load-bearing. It is that your own team can carry this after we stop.
- Everything in your repositories and cloud accounts from day one
- Documentation and a walkthrough for whoever runs it next
- Help interviewing and levelling the engineers you hire yourself
- Cancel monthly — staying should be your choice, not a lock-in
Embedded first, or scoped if you would rather start smaller.
Most hiring conversations start with the embedded engineer. The other two exist because sometimes what you actually need is one thing built, or capacity against a roadmap.
Model 01 · Where most hiring conversations land
Embedded engineer
One senior engineer working inside your team — your Slack, your standups, your repository.
They make the technical decisions a founding hire would make: architecture, hands-on shipping, and help hiring the team that comes after them. Not a contractor taking tickets, and not an agency bench you are introduced to after signing.
Commercials
Model 02
Fixed-scope build
A defined deliverable with milestones and a price agreed up front, built and handed over.
Useful when you can describe the thing you need rather than the role you are missing: an agent, a backend rebuild, a migration, an MVP that has to reach users on a date.
Commercials
Model 03
Ongoing engineering partner
A standing block of senior capacity against a roadmap you set.
For teams past the first build who need continuous delivery, plus the reliability, infrastructure and performance work that never makes it onto a product roadmap.
Commercials
Read what they wrote before you meet them.
These are write-ups of real engagements, mistakes included. It is a better interview signal than a CV, and it is available before you spend an hour on a call.
Case study
Making cross-tenant leakage impossible, not merely avoided
An AI agent reading and writing real invoices for many client companies out of one Postgres. The tenant filter living in application code is a promise the model never made, so the boundary moved into the database — with two CI gates so a new table cannot ship without it.
Engineering note
The tenant fallback that served one company's books to another
Four branches, three of which refused to degrade. The fourth fell back, and the unit test covering it was named as though it proved the opposite — which is how the bug stayed in place for months without anything turning red.
Engineering note
Two lines to see what your LLM is actually doing
Before optimising anything in an AI build, make it observable. This is the one-minute version, and it is the first thing our engineers do on an engagement rather than the thing promised for later.
India-based engineers, working your morning.
StarkSphere Labs is registered in Dubai and the engineering is done from India, for founders who are mostly in the United States and Europe. We overlap your morning, and the work carries on while you sleep.
You are hiring one accountable senior engineer, so this sits above an offshore body shop on price and below a US or UK agency of the same seniority. That gap is geography, not seniority — and we would rather say so plainly than let you find it out from the invoice.
The engineers are senior — eight years and up, out of big-tech and fintech teams — and they are the people you meet on the first call, not a bench you are introduced to afterwards.
Working with us
What founders ask before hiring this way.
Is this a job board, a staffing agency, or something else?
Something else. You are not posting a role and waiting, and you are not being sold hours from a bench. You get one named senior engineer who works inside your team on a monthly term you can cancel, and if they are not right you say so and we stop — you are not left carrying a bad hire for a year.
Can they work in our time zone?
The engineering is done from India and we deliberately overlap your morning, so there is a working day of progress waiting before your standup and live hours for the calls that need them. Teams in the US and Europe are most of our work; this is the normal arrangement, not an exception we are making for you.
What does a senior AI engineer cost this way?
A monthly retainer against defined weekly hours, agreed in writing, cancellable monthly. It costs less than a US or UK agency of the same seniority because of where the engineers live, not because of who they are — and more than an offshore body shop, because you are hiring one accountable senior engineer rather than a seat. The budget bands on our contact form run from under $10k to $50k+.
How quickly can someone start?
A 45-minute call to agree what the engineer owns, then access on day one and something real merged by the end of the first week. There is no ramp-up month billed as discovery.
What happens when we hire our own AI team?
That is the intended ending. The work already lives in your repositories, the decisions are written down, and our engineer will help you interview and level the people you hire. Some clients keep one embedded engineer alongside their own team for continuity; most do not need to, and we would rather tell you that than bill for another quarter.