Work out which role you are actually advertising
"AI engineer" gets used as a catch-all for three jobs that share a job title and almost nothing else. They have different pools, different pay and different scarcity, so the choice is worth making before you write a word of the advert. Each of these is a distinct role on this board, with its own live market rate.
AI Engineer
Builds the product around existing models — retrieval, evaluation, agent design, guardrails.
Shipped systems with real users. This is what most teams advertising for an "AI engineer" actually want.
AI Research Scientist
Trains and evaluates models, and owns whether an approach works at all.
Publications or equivalent depth. The smallest and most expensive pool of the three.
MLOps Engineer
Serving, inference cost, observability and the data pipelines underneath.
Production ownership. Often the real bottleneck once something is live.
Those are the three most teams choose between, but they are not the whole picture: LLM Engineer, RAG Engineer, Computer Vision Engineer and NLP Engineer are separate markets with their own rates. If your problem is specifically one of those, advertise it by that name — the audience searching for it is smaller, but it converts far better than a generic title.
What the market is paying
Advertised ranges move quickly and candidates compare them openly, often in the same places they hear about your company. This is what employers are currently advertising on this board — the salaries stated in the advert, not offers accepted.
Based on live Artificial Intelligence Jobs adverts for Ai Engineer roles across the UK. Salaries stated in the advert, not offers accepted.
Remote or office-anchored
Genuine remote widens the pool nationally; anchoring to one office narrows it and prices up.
Greenfield or inherited
Maintaining someone else's pipeline is priced as a premium, not a discount.
Someone senior to learn from
Worth more to candidates than most employers think — and it costs nothing.
If you cannot meet the range, the fix is rarely more money. A narrower role, a clearer problem, or real flexibility on location all cost less than a search that stalls for a quarter. There is more on this in what AI engineers are paid.
Decide on sponsorship and contracting before you advertise
A large share of the UK's applied AI talent is on, or will need, a Skilled Worker visa. The same applies to contract roles and IR35. Neither is a decision you want to discover at offer stage.
Say it plainly in the advert
- Not a licensed sponsor? State it. Silence reads as "no" and wastes everyone's time.
- Intending to become one? Start the licence before you start interviewing.
- It is measured in weeks, not days. Word travels in a market this small.
Publish status and rate together
- Determine IR35 status before the advert goes live.
- Contractors filter on status first and rate second.
- An advert stating neither reads as a company that has not decided.
Write the advert candidates actually answer
The adverts that get replies say what the person will work on in their first quarter, who they will work with, and what "good" looks like a year in. The ones that do not tend to open with company history and close with a list of desirable technologies.
Before you publish
Run a process that does not lose the people you want
Multi-day take-home exercises filter for availability rather than ability, and the strongest candidates are the least likely to have a free weekend.
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1
Replace the take-home with a conversation
A focused discussion about a real problem from your own codebase tells you more, costs the candidate less, and shows them the work they would actually be doing.
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2
Agree what a pass looks like before the first interview
Then tell candidates the shape of the process up front — how many stages, who they will meet, and how long a decision takes. Then hold to it.
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3
Decide inside a week
Slow feedback loses more offers than low salaries do.
If your decision takes two weeks, assume anyone in an active search has another offer in hand before you reply.
Where to look first
Before writing an advert, it is worth seeing what the rest of the market is offering for the same role — the ranges, the seniority language, and which companies are hiring against you right now.