Save Up to 55% — Without Compromising on Quality
Here's the honest version most agencies won't give you: a senior AI engineer in the UK typically costs £6,000–£9,000 per month once salary, tax and overhead are counted, and the contract market is worse — £600–£900 a day is normal for anyone with shipped LLM work behind them. A dedicated AI developer through Codified Studio costs $2,000–$3,500 per month for full-time work, because our team operates remotely from Pakistan with none of the UK office overhead baked into your invoice.
You're not trading quality for the saving. You get:
A dedicated developer working only on your project
Direct daily comms — no account-manager relay
In-house senior standards: testing & code review
Scale the team up or down, no hiring overhead
Why Hire a Dedicated AI Developer (Instead of a Freelance AI Engineer)?
The freelance AI engineer market is the least legible hiring market in software right now. Titles are new, portfolios are demos, and the gap between someone who has called an API and someone who has run an LLM feature in production under load is enormous — and invisible on a CV. A dedicated developer inside an accountable team removes most of that risk.
Production AI, not notebook AI.
Evaluation harnesses, regression tests on prompts, fallback behaviour when the model is wrong, and cost ceilings per request. The unglamorous half is the half that decides whether the feature survives contact with customers.
Retrieval done properly (RAG).
Chunking strategy, embeddings, a vector index that stays fresh as your content changes, and citations so answers are checkable. Most “the AI hallucinates” complaints are retrieval problems wearing a model costume.
Agents that do work, with a leash.
Tool-calling agents that read your systems and take real actions — with scoped permissions, human approval on anything irreversible, and full traces of what ran and why.
Costs you can forecast.
Token spend modelled before launch, caching where responses repeat, and a smaller model used wherever it measurably matches the big one. AI features that quietly cost more than they earn are a design failure, not a surprise.
Dedicated AI Development
LLMs, RAG & Agents — What We Actually Build
“AI developer” covers a wide range of work, so here is the concrete version. Our AI engineers build features into products you already run, on infrastructure you already own — not standalone science projects that never integrate.
One thing we'll say plainly at scoping: a large share of “we need AI” briefs are better solved by ordinary automation or a decent search index, for a fraction of the cost and none of the unpredictability. We'll tell you when that's the case rather than sell you a model you don't need.
What Does a AI Developer Do?
A dedicated AI developer takes a feature from vague ambition to something running in production. Day to day, that means:
At Codified Studio, your AI developer works alongside our back-end and product engineers — so the feature ships inside your actual product, with tests and monitoring, rather than arriving as a separate prototype for someone else to integrate.
Key Technologies & Tools We Use
The exact stack your dedicated AIdeveloper builds with — production-grade tools, not whatever's trending this week.
How We Work — From First Call to Launch (and After)
No black box. Here's exactly what happens once you bring us in:
Discovery call
We scope what you actually need — a real conversation about the product, timeline, and technical constraints. This is where we figure out if you need a specialist, a full-stack developer, or a small team.
Proposal & team match
You get a clear scope, timeline, and price — no vague “let's discuss” pricing. We match you with the developer(s) whose past project experience is closest to what you're building.
Kickoff & sprint planning
Your developer is introduced, the project is broken into sprints, and you get a shared board so progress is visible from day one.
Build
Development happens in short, reviewable cycles — not a single black-box handoff at the end. You see working software early and often.
QA & testing
Every feature is tested — unit tests, integration tests, and manual QA — before it's marked done.
Launch
Deployment, performance checks, and a final walkthrough so your team knows exactly what's live and how it works.
Post-launch support
We stay on for bug fixes, monitoring, and ongoing feature work — on a retainer or ad-hoc basis, whichever fits how your product will actually evolve.
How to Hire a AI Developer
If you're evaluating who to bring onto your project, here's what actually matters:
Ask what they've shipped, not what they've tried.
Demos are cheap now. Ask for an AI feature live in production with real users, and what broke in the first month.
Probe evaluation, not prompting.
“How would you know if a prompt change made it worse?” separates engineers from enthusiasts faster than any other question.
Check they'll argue against AI.
A developer who never says “this doesn't need a model” will happily bill you for one. Honest scoping is a skill, not a soft one.
Confirm data handling up front.
Where your data goes, which providers see it, what's retained, and whether anything is used for training. Get it in writing before a single document is uploaded.
Insist on cost modelling.
Ask for projected token spend at your expected volume. If nobody can produce a number, nobody has thought about it.
Or skip the vetting yourself — hire through Codified Studio. We've already done steps 2–4 above for every developer on our team. You get a scoped proposal, a point of contact, and a developer who's already proven on real projects — not a resume.
How Much Does It Cost to Hire a AI Developer?
AI engineer costs in the UK have moved fast, and the contract market especially. Here's how the options compare for full-time equivalent work:
| Engagement type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| UK in-house hire (mid-level) | £4,500 – £6,000 / month |
| UK in-house hire (senior) | £6,000 – £9,000 / month |
| Freelance / contract AI engineer | £600 – £900 / day |
| Dedicated AI developer via Codified Studio | $2,000 – $3,500 / month |
The cheapest option on paper isn't always the cheapest in practice. A freelancer at a lower day rate who needs heavy management, or a junior hire who needs mentoring through architecture decisions, often costs more in total than a dedicated developer who's already integrated into a proven team process. When you hire through Codified Studio, pricing is transparent from the first quote — no hidden onboarding fees, no surprise scope creep.
Get a Tailored QuoteHire a Remote AI Developer, Fully Integrated with Your Team
“Remote” doesn't mean “hands-off.” Every developer we place works to UK business hours overlap, with daily standups, sprint check-ins, and a dedicated project manager as your single point of contact — so it feels like an in-house hire, minus the in-house overhead. Whether you need one developer for three months or a small dedicated team for an ongoing product, the process and communication structure stays exactly the same.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most clients are matched with a developer within 3–5 business days of an initial scoping call. If you have a hard start date, mention it in your brief and we'll confirm whether it works.
A senior AI developer hired in-house in the UK typically costs £6,000–£9,000 per month once salary, tax, and overhead are counted, and freelancers add agency-level day rates on top. A dedicated AI developer through Codified Studio costs $2,000–$3,500 per month for full-time work — the same seniority without the UK employment overhead. The full comparison is in the cost table above.
In practice the first two are used interchangeably, and both describe someone who builds AI features into software — integration, retrieval, evaluation, deployment. A data scientist is a different job: analysis, statistics and training models from scratch. Almost every brief that arrives here asking to hire AI developers wants the first kind, which is what our team does.
Yes — tool-calling agents that read from and write to your internal systems are common work now. We scope permissions tightly, require human approval on anything destructive or irreversible, and log a full trace of every action so you can audit what ran. An agent with unrestricted write access to production is a liability, not a feature.
Almost certainly not. For the large majority of products, a well-built retrieval layer over a general-purpose model beats a fine-tuned one on quality, cost and time to ship — and it stays current as your data changes. Fine-tuning earns its cost for narrow, high-volume tasks with a stable format. We'll tell you honestly which side of that line you're on.
It stays yours. We work with providers' zero-retention and enterprise terms where available, keep your documents in infrastructure you own, and put the specifics — which provider, what's sent, what's stored, what's excluded — in the scope document before any work starts. An NDA is available before you share project details at all.
Claude, GPT and open-weight models depending on the task, cost and data constraints. We build behind a provider-agnostic interface as standard, so switching model or vendor later is a configuration change rather than a rewrite — which matters in a market where prices and deprecations move quarterly.
Other Roles You Can Hire
Not sure you need a full-time developer?
Hiring makes sense when the work is ongoing or your team just needs more capacity. If you have one defined thing to build instead, a fixed-scope ai chatbot development project gives you a firm price and a delivery date up front.
Ready to hire a AI Developerwho's already part of a proven team?
Tell us about your project and we'll come back with a scoped recommendation — not a generic sales call.