RAG Engineer vs ML Engineer vs AI Architect: Who Should You Hire?
Which AI specialist your project actually needs, role by role
Hire AI & ML Engineers
Hire AI & ML Engineers On Demand
Engineers who take models to production and keep them there. LLM applications, RAG, vision and the MLOps underneath. Profiles within 24 hours.
Trusted by teams worldwide
AI Specialists by Discipline
Six AI specialisms, staffed by engineers who have shipped models into products rather than only into notebooks.
01
LLM Application Engineers
- Prompt and context design
- Tool use and function calling
- Evaluation harnesses
- Cost and latency control
- Guardrails and fallbacks
02
RAG Pipeline Engineers
- Chunking and embedding strategy
- Vector store selection
- Hybrid and re-ranked retrieval
- Freshness and reindexing
- Grounding and citation
03
Machine Learning Engineers
- Feature engineering
- Model selection and training
- Offline and online evaluation
- Drift detection
- Retraining pipelines
04
Computer Vision Engineers
- Detection and segmentation
- OCR and document parsing
- Edge and on-device inference
- Annotation pipelines
- Quality inspection systems
05
NLP Engineers
- Classification and extraction
- Entity and intent models
- Multilingual handling
- Summarisation pipelines
- Domain fine-tuning
06
MLOps Engineers
- Training and serving infrastructure
- Model registry and versioning
- Monitoring and alerting
- Reproducible experiments
- GPU cost management
Deep Capabilities
What Our AI Engineers Are Actually Judged On
We screen for the gap between a demo and a product, alongside our AI development and data teams.
Evaluation Before Enthusiasm
A measurable eval set before shipping, so quality is a number rather than a vibe.
Cost and Latency Discipline
Token spend and response time treated as product requirements from the start.
Grounding and Guardrails
Retrieval grounding, refusal handling and fallbacks so failure is graceful.
Data Pipeline Reality
Most of the work is the data, and our engineers expect that rather than resent it.
Production Serving
Inference that stays up, scales with demand and does not surprise you on cost.
Honest About Fit
Engineers who will tell you when a rules engine beats a model for your problem.
Free AI Feasibility Call
Adding AI to Your Product? Get a Free Feasibility Call.
One call about your data, your use case and your quality bar tells you whether it is feasible, what it will cost to run and the team shape you need.
Get Your Feasibility CallFree · No obligation · Delivered within 48 hours
Our Process
From Requirement to Engineer Onboarded
Three steps and about forty hours, rather than a hiring process measured in months.
1
Week 1
Discovery
We discuss your stack, backlog, seniority needs and working hours.
2
Week 1–2
Design
You get interview-ready profiles matched to the requirement within 24 hours.
3
Week 2–8
Development
You interview and choose, with a 15-day risk-free trial on every placement.
4
Week 6–10
QA & Hardening
Onboarding into your tools, rituals and codebase, with our architect on hand.
5
Ongoing
Launch & Support
Ongoing delivery with the flexibility to scale the team up or down.
Measurable Impact
Numbers From AI Placements
24 hr
To first profiles
Interview-ready candidates matched to your use case.
Eval
Driven delivery
Quality measured against a real eval set, not demos.
6
Specialism pools
LLM, RAG, ML, vision, NLP and MLOps.
15 day
Risk-free trial
Replace at no cost if the fit is wrong.
Case Studies
Work We've Shipped
Products we have shipped across digital health, streaming and voice AI, plus a solution showcase that connects voice calls to Odoo.
LIVE IN PRODUCTION
DeepRest: Anxiety & Sleep Relief App
Paced breathing, a 21-day anxiety reset and night-time audio that keeps working on a bad connection.
95%Users feel calmer
21-dayAnxiety reset
HIPAA-READY BUILD
KALBI: Telecardiology ECG Review
Patients upload an ECG from their phone and a cardiologist returns a signed report inside 24 hours.
24hSigned report
100%Cardiologist reviewed
LIVE IN PRODUCTION
Ideal TV: OTT Streaming Platform
100+ live channels, movies and sport across mobile, web and connected TV, with one billing spine behind it.
100+Live channels
4Platforms shipped
15,000+Viewers
SOLUTION SHOWCASE
Voice AI + Odoo: Conversation to Action
Voice calls connected to Odoo CRM and ERP: identity checks first, a verified order status read from the record, and a clear route to a person.
6Connected workflows
4Steps, call to record
LIVE IN PRODUCTION
AI Voice Agent for Doctors & Hospitals
A HIPAA-ready voice agent that answers every patient call, books into the clinical system and hands over to a person when it should.
70%Front-desk load removed
24/7Calls answered
0Voicemails left
Tech Stack
Our AI Technology Stack
PyTorch
TensorFlow
Hugging Face
LangChain
LlamaIndex
OpenAI
Anthropic
pgvector
Pinecone
Weaviate
Ray
MLflow
Airflow
Triton
ONNX
Industries
AI Teams Across Every Use Case
Six use cases where AI staffing needs differ in ways that matter.
01
Support Automation
Deflection that does not frustrate customers.
- Intent routing
- Grounded answers
- Escalation rules
02
Document Processing
Extraction from messy real-world documents.
- OCR pipelines
- Field extraction
- Human review
03
Clinical AI
Models supporting clinical decisions.
- Data governance
- Bias review
- Audit trails
04
Risk & Fraud
Detection where false positives cost money.
- Feature pipelines
- Threshold tuning
- Explainability
05
Personalisation
Recommendations that lift real metrics.
- Ranking models
- Cold start
- A/B measurement
06
Industrial Vision
Inspection and safety on the line.
- Edge inference
- Defect detection
- Annotation loops
Client Voices
Trusted By Teams Who Ship
“Appther built our student competition app exactly the way we envisioned it: easy registration, smooth judging, and real-time results that keep participants engaged.”
Dionna MilemOwner · My BOB Team LLC
“Building a mental health app means every detail has to be handled with care, and Appther got that from day one. The product feels warm, simple, and genuinely helpful.”
Bob SinghalProfessor of Joy · Joyscore Inc
“Appther exceeded every expectation, on time and on budget, and the final product has been instrumental in scaling our business. A rare engineering partner.”
Johnathan PefferCEO · Bull's Eye Technologies Inc
“Implementing an ERP across our operations felt daunting at first, but Appther made the transition seamless. Every department now works off a single source of truth.”
Pushpender KumarGeneral Manager · AB Sugar Ltd
Latest Insights
Notes on Shipping AI
Field notes from real builds. No hype, just what worked and what didn't.
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How to Implement RAG in Your AI System: Architecture & Process
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Hire the Best AI Developers: Everything You Need to Know
Hiring trends, essential skills and rate ranges for AI talent
Free 30-Minute AI Team Call
The Right AI Engineer Is One Conversation Away. Start Here.
Walk away from one call with a feasibility view, a team shape, a rate range and a start date. No pitch deck, no obligation.
Feasibility view
Role shortlist
Rate range
Book My Free Call
200+Projects delivered
4.8★Client rating
15+Countries served
99.9%Production uptime
FAQ
Questions We Hear Every Week
LLM application work with OpenAI and Anthropic models, RAG using pgvector, Pinecone and Weaviate, classical ML in PyTorch and scikit-learn, computer vision, NLP, and MLOps on MLflow, Ray and Airflow.
Yes, they are separate pools from general ML. Tell us whether the work is retrieval quality, agent and tool use, or evaluation and cost control, and we match on that rather than a generic AI title.
Yes, and they will suggest the cheaper alternative. A rules engine or a well-tuned search index beats a model for plenty of problems, and finding that out during scoping is far cheaper than after.
Yes. Engagements run full-time, part-time or hourly with no long-term lock-in, so you can add engineers for a push and release them afterwards.
You do, entirely. We sign an NDA before any technical conversation and assign all IP to you as work is delivered.
We replace them, at no cost and with no notice period. Every placement runs a 15-day risk-free trial, and you keep everything produced during it.
An Engineer Replies Within One Business Day
Hire Your AI Team
Tell us the use case and what data you have. No sales pitch, just profiles that fit. Prefer email? Use our contact page.
Free 30-min strategy callScoping and honest, practical advice.
Fixed-price quoteDetailed scope and price after discovery, no surprises.
NDA on requestYour idea and code always stay yours.
Prefer to talk now?+91 99114 32288 · info@appther.com
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