Hire LLM engineers without slowing down your roadmap.
Commit Offshore, the Israeli-led offshore hiring division of COMMIT, places senior LLM engineers who have built production RAG, evaluation and AI agent features for Israeli startups and R&D teams. Every candidate passes a senior recruiter screen and a recorded live technical exam built for the role. The first vetted CV usually arrives within 48 hours of a confirmed brief.
Updated 3 November 2026
What our LLM engineers build
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over your documents and data
- Evaluation pipelines that measure answer quality before release
- AI agents that call your tools and APIs
- Fine-tuning and prompt optimization
- Cost and latency control for LLM features in production
Every LLM engineer we send is labelled with one of five AI-ready levels. What AI-ready means.
LLM engineer vs. ML engineer
| Criteria | LLM engineer | ML engineer |
|---|---|---|
| Main work | Builds products on top of existing large language models | Trains and deploys custom models |
| Typical tools | LLM APIs, vector databases, RAG frameworks, eval tools | PyTorch, TensorFlow, feature stores, training pipelines |
| Hire when | You're adding generative-AI features to a product | You need custom prediction or classification models |
How we test LLM engineers
Every LLM candidate takes a recorded technical exam built for your role, after a senior recruiter has read their CV and run a screening call. The exam changes with the engagement. For Bridgewise, a fintech building LLM features under regulation, it was a recorded exam on real Bridgewise data plus a live discussion of a recent LLM-evaluation paper.
We label each LLM candidate with the AI-ready level their production work supports. The two levels that usually apply to LLM roles are:
- Level 3, AI application engineer: has shipped production features on LLM APIs.
- Level 4, LLM, RAG or agent specialist: has owned retrieval, evaluation pipelines or agents in production.
Levels 3 to 5 are given only when the candidate has done that work in production and passed an exam built for it.
What an LLM engineer costs
All-in monthly cost per engineer in US dollars, from our cost calculator rates for October 2026. For the offshore locations, all-in means salary, local employer costs, benefits, equipment, Employer of Record and our fee; the Tel Aviv row is the estimated cost of a local hire. These are estimates, not a quote: AI and LLM specialists are quoted per role, and the exact price depends on stack, location and contract length.
| Location | Senior (5 to 8 yrs) | Lead / Architect (8+ yrs) |
|---|---|---|
| Tel Aviv, Israel (local hire, for comparison) | $14,500 | $19,500 |
| Kyiv, Ukraine | $7,000 | $10,000 |
| Warsaw, Poland | $8,750 | $12,000 |
| Bucharest, Romania | $7,600 | $10,700 |
| Tbilisi, Georgia | $6,100 | $8,750 |
| Manila, Philippines | $5,500 | $8,250 |
| Accra, Ghana | $5,200 | $8,000 |
| Lagos, Nigeria | $5,400 | $8,200 |
All 11 locations and three seniority levels are in the 2026 engineering cost benchmark, and you can compare your own mix in the cost calculator.
How long each step takes
These are typical targets, not guarantees. Each number means something different, so we keep them apart.
| Milestone | Usual timing | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| First vetted CV | Usually within 48 hours | Counted from a confirmed brief. A candidate profile, not a start date. |
| Finalists to interview | 2 to 3 per role | Staff Augmentation. Tech Recruitment & Placement sends a shortlist of 5 to 8, usually within 72 hours. |
| Start date | Typically about 2 weeks after you choose | Subject to the engineer's notice period. |
| Bench start | Within 48 hours of sign-off, case by case | Only for bench specialists who are free at that moment, subject to access and NDA. |
What you receive with every candidate
- The CV, checked by a senior recruiter who has read it and run a screening call
- The score from a recorded technical exam built for your role, scored against a rubric you can review
- The exam recording, so your engineers can see how the candidate works
- The recruiter's notes
- An AI-ready level from 1 to 5
Candidates who have not passed the recorded exam are never sent. The full process is on how we vet engineers.
Proof
“Engineers who can ship eval-grade LLM pipelines into regulated fintech are nearly impossible to find. Commit Offshore embedded them with us…”Elad Nachmias, CTO, Bridgewise
Lunar.dev, an AI-gateway startup, used Commit Offshore for on-demand engineering capacity: relevant candidates within days of a request, integrated into delivery within weeks.
Questions we get asked most.
Two ways to start. Both reach Lee directly.
Book a 30-minute call to talk it through, or send the role and get your first CV, usually within 48 hours. Either way, Lee replies the same business day.