Your AI engineer recruitment specialists
Nexus IT Group is your trusted recruiting partner for AI engineer recruiting, connecting companies with machine learning experts committed to driving innovation and transformation. As one of the first staffing companies in the United States focused purely on AI and machine learning jobs, we have extensive networks of deep learning specialists, MLOps engineers, and natural language processing experts who can help you build intelligent systems, optimize your operations, and unlock the value in your data. This is critical because the top AI engineering professionals aren’t actively looking for a job–in fact, they’re contacted so frequently by headhunters they’ve shut down the most common ways to get opportunities in front of them.
AI engineers are in high demand
In today’s world, artificial intelligence is a transformative force for business. From the models you deploy to enhance customer experiences to your proprietary algorithms and automated decision-making systems, AI capabilities are becoming essential to maintaining competitive advantage. Equally important is ensuring responsible AI development that meets ethical guidelines and regulatory requirements. Our recruiting teams’ acumen and understanding of the AI industry let us balance all of these demands to bring enterprises the right employees for their needs. We can identify top talent at all levels, including executive search as well as individual contributors like ML engineers, AI researchers, computer vision specialists, and generative AI experts. The staffing services we provide at Nexus can help you build a world-class AI engineering team, giving you the competitive edge to innovate and scale your intelligent systems.
Solving AI engineering hiring challenges
Whether you’re a hiring manager with a set of difficult AI engineering roles to fill or a machine learning professional considering changing jobs, we would love to chat about your needs and how our team of AI engineer recruiters can serve as partners in your search. Similar to technology roles across industries, the AI sector is evolving rapidly, and having an experienced professional on your side can help you successfully navigate this changing landscape. Even if you just want some insights into how our recruiters help connect talent with AI engineering opportunities, we hope you’ll reach out to our search firm so we can share our expertise and help your company or career continue to move forward.
Join the many companies that staff their roles with our AI engineer talent
Nexus IT Group will quickly staff your open AI engineer roles with high-quality committed candidates
81%
of our successful candidates are submitted within one week
92%
of our candidates will accept your offer
96%
of our candidates are employed with your firm after 12 months
Four ways to build an AI team whether you are hiring a first ML lead or scaling a platform group
Executive Search (Retained)
We run retained searches for the people who set an AI strategy rather than execute one, including Head of AI, VP of Machine Learning, Director of Applied Research and founding AI engineers at companies making their first serious hire. These searches are slow by nature because the credible pool is small and heavily courted, so we work them confidentially and present a shortlist your leadership team can actually meet. Our retained placements hold a 96% candidate retention rate.
Direct Hire
The AI engineers worth hiring are not reading job boards, they are shipping models and fielding three approaches a week. Our recruiters work outbound into research groups, applied teams and the labs your competitors hire from, and we can put a vetted shortlist in front of you within 4 days of taking the requirement. We check what a candidate actually built rather than what a framework list implies, because a resume that names PyTorch, LangChain and a vector database tells you very little on its own.
Contract Staffing
AI work often starts as a proof of concept with an uncertain runway, and hiring permanently against that is a difficult thing to justify. We serve as both the recruiter and the W2 employer for the contract term, which removes co-employment risk and lets you end the engagement or convert the person to full time once the project earns its place. Our contract placements hold a 94.3% quality of hire ratio, measured on contractors who complete the full term.
Recruitment as a Service
Companies building an AI function from nothing usually need several roles at once, which is exactly when a per-placement fee becomes hard to swallow. Our Recruitment as a Service subscription covers candidate marketing, sourcing, screening and delivery for the whole group, while your technical leadership spends its time on final interviews. We generate an engaged pipeline for a named AI role in under 7 days.
We have filled a variety of AI engineer roles
Open AI engineer roles right now
What our AI engineer clients have said about working with Nexus IT Group
The great thing about nexus IT group is that it has a smaller family feel, but they are able to deliver IT candidates better than the largest IT staffing suppliers that we work with. They have delivered high quality cybersecurity professionals for several years to our firm.
I’ve been in Talent Acquisition for 15 years and have used many IT staffing firms over the years. I highly recommend Nick and nexus IT group over any other IT staffing services. nexus’ commitment to quality and delivery is top tier. They take the time to understand your needs, provide thorough screening, and make sure that candidates have a positive on-boarding experience.
Working with nexus IT group has made my job much easier. Having a recruiting firm who specializes in IT and within my industry, and who understands our specific culture and hiring needs has been instrumental in our talent acquisition talent strategy.
Capital One has used nexus IT group’s recruitment services for a number of IT positions at varying levels, over the past 4 years. We’ve had a high success rate working with nexus IT group which is a testament to the caliber of their work and their internal sourcing and vetting practices.
I’ve dealt with a lot of hiring firms in my 18 years in the investment banking profession, and the majority of them have been awful to mediocre at best. Dealing with Nexus IT Group, on the other hand, was a breath of fresh air. After only one one opening, I was blown away by the quality and quantity of resumes I received. Nexus IT Group pays close attention to my demands and requirements. As a result, the individuals who were referred to me were excellent fits for our open positions. I appreciate the personal and professional expertise you offer to the process.
SAIC provides government services to several federal agencies across the US. We needed to recruit several new cybersecurity talent for our growing practice area. Travis quickly understood our business and the requirements of each cybersecurity need. nexus IT group showed patience, flexibility, and expertise in the search process. If you’re looking for good cybersecurity recruiters then you can’t go wrong with nexus IT group.
It is hard to put into words what nexus IT group has done for our organization. nexus IT group knows exactly what we look for and they get the right candidates 99% of the time. Anyone looking to hire tech talent would be lucky to have nexus IT group on their side. They have great work ethic, responsive, and a wide array of market knowledge.
We’ve enlisted the help of a number of IT recruiting firms in the past. Nexus IT Group has contributed to the success of many great hires by working professionally, diligently, and efficiently. We contacted Nexus IT Group after being introduced to them, and we were instantly impressed by their promptness and ability to focus on our needs. We received 3 resumes the same day and 3 more the next day, and we were able to hire four people in less than a week. We added an additional individual through Nexus IT Group a few weeks later as a result of vast network, service and professionalism. I highly recommend working with Nexus IT Group.
Our AI engineer staffing skills keep our clients coming back
Senior AI Engineer
Our client is a mid-sized SaaS business whose product team had committed to shipping an AI assistant inside their platform, without anybody in house who had put a model into production before. The search was difficult because the role needed someone comfortable moving between model work and ordinary backend engineering. We sourced 214 candidates, submitted four and the client hired the second person they interviewed.
Machine Learning Engineer
A national ecommerce retailer wanted to replace a spreadsheet driven demand forecast with a model that could run weekly across several thousand products. Their difficulty was finding somebody who had shipped forecasting rather than studied it, since most applicants had notebook experience and nothing in production. We presented five candidates in nine days and the hire had the first model live within a quarter.
NLP Engineer
Our client builds document review software for law firms and needed an NLP engineer to take their extraction pipeline off a third party API and bring it in house. The requirement combined transformer experience with a tolerance for messy scanned documents, which narrowed the field considerably. We screened 168 candidates, submitted three and the client made an offer inside three weeks.
Head of AI
A Series B company had four engineers doing machine learning work with nobody setting direction, and the board asked for a leader before the next raise. The search ran confidentially while the existing team stayed in place. We ran a national process, presented six candidates and the client hired a leader who had built the same function twice before.
Computer Vision Engineer
A manufacturer wanted to replace manual quality inspection on two production lines with a camera based system, and needed an engineer who had deployed vision models on a factory floor rather than in a lab. Onsite presence four days a week narrowed the pool further. We sourced 97 candidates and the client hired the only one who had done both.
Nexus IT Group recruits nationwide including these cities
Frequently asked questions about AI engineer recruiting
To nexus IT group, placement is an art—one that requires the proper alignment of talent with opportunity, experience with need, personality with environment, and aspirations with value. The AI engineering sector is a fast-paced, highly competitive recruiting environment that offers big opportunities for AI candidates. Our full-cycle recruiting system is a 51 step touchpoint process from start to finish. Our engagement process starts with a discovery call to understand the needs of the role. With this series of questions, our AI engineer recruiters are able to build a sales cadence that we will use to deploy a multi-touch recruiting cadence precisely and accurately to hundreds of candidates that fit the expectations of the role. Once our targeted search is executed, we spend a series of 3 calls to get to know the candidates’ needs, wants, and future career interests. Once we’ve created a shortlist of qualified and fully vetted candidates, we will deliver our top 2 to 3 candidates to the AI engineering hiring manager. Once the interview process starts, we work with the candidate and the hiring team to make sure communication is responsive and transparent. Once a candidate is placed, we stay in touch with the placed candidate for 2 years just to see how things are going.
Our candidate sourcing can be described in 3 words: Identify. Engage. Toolstack. Typically, the best job prospects are those who are passive. This indicates that they are not actively seeking employment. As a result, they are not surfing the Internet in search of online job postings. And because they are not viewing online job postings, we have developed a robust and 100% outbound recruiting strategy. We begin our sourcing strategy by creating a candidate persona. Once we have successfully created the candidate persona, we will then create a content strategy that will attract top talent in the AI engineering space. Once we’ve developed our cadence, we will use a number of sources to scour the web to get our message in front of the right candidates. Strategies include searching our database, sourcing for referrals, sourcing from specific organizations, LinkedIn, Meetup, Angel List, Dice, alumni boards, GitHub, Kaggle, and many other niche AI/ML community sites. We craft highly personalized messages that drive above industry reply rates. Our recruiting strategy is to begin conversations with passive candidates to learn about their future career interests, needs, and wants and align those needs with future openings with a high-touch approach.
Quality of Hire is very important for nexus IT group and our AI engineer recruiting team. Currently our AI engineer recruiters hold a 96.08% quality of hire ratio. This is measured by any contractor who successfully completes their contract, and/or a direct placement candidate who is at our client for at least 6 months of duration.
Currently our 1 year retention rate with our AI engineering clients is running right at 96.2%.
The AI engineering hiring space is fast-paced, so our team of AI engineer recruiters are trained to work swiftly. The time required to send qualified candidates to the AI engineering hiring manager varies on the position you are seeking to fill and the challenges we will face such as lower than market compensation, bonus concerns, slow feedback, onsite expectations, etc. We can deliver applicants on the day of contract signing, within a few days, or within a few weeks.
We’ve spent a great deal of time in early-stage recruiting and have had the distinct pleasure of collaborating with a number of amazing VCs and founders. From our perspective, the Musks of the world represent the future of technology, and we are major believers and investors in technology because, of course, it is the future. The AI revolution is particularly exciting as we help companies build teams that are pushing the boundaries of machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial general intelligence. However, recruiting for Seed and Series A/B early-stage firms presents a distinct set of obstacles.
AI engineer recruiters specialize in a specific market sector. Every day, our AI engineering recruiters contact a specialized set of AI/ML candidates. When starting a new search, our team has a pool of personally-known candidates to call immediately. The point is that specialized AI recruiters sprint out of the gate more effectively than staffing firms that go back to the drawing board for each search.
When employers receive a resume from an AI engineering recruiting firm, there is a high probability that they are familiar with the individual. Our clients trust that we have thoroughly screened the candidate over a series of multiple conversations, and that they will be worth the hiring manager’s time to interview.
Another benefit of using a specialized AI engineering recruiting firm is you will experience less of a “resume broker” relationship and more of a “sector expert.” We spend countless hours every day conversing with AI/ML prospects and AI engineering employers, making us more “in the know” about the AI engineering space. AI engineer recruiters can provide insight into the landscape of AI employment, equity, current pay, and the most recent candidate challenges.
Ultimately, AI engineer recruiters have access to a concentrated pool of candidates, resulting in increased efficiency during the hiring process and the ability to establish long-lasting relationships with the industry’s top talent.
Though we have several different practice areas such as government IT staffing, digital marketing staffing, private equity staffing, DevOps staffing, cloud staffing, data science staffing, and software development staffing, our AI engineer recruiters are hyper-focused on clients in the AI/ML space. Our AI engineering recruiting team has successfully worked with clients ranging from budding startups to Fortune 50 organizations.
Whether you’re recruiting for a Machine Learning Engineer, AI Architect, NLP Engineer, Computer Vision Engineer, Deep Learning Specialist, or MLOps Engineer – our recruiting solutions have you covered. Our hires range from just about anything you can imagine that a company would need when hiring AI engineering talent — including leadership roles like Head of AI, VP of Machine Learning, Chief AI Officer, and many more—with a niche focus in AI engineering staffing.
Our AI engineer recruiters use a series of stages to make sure we minimize candidate fallout during the recruiting cycle. Our recruiters will perform an in-depth conversation where they work to uncover the needs, wants, and desires of their next career move. We ask candidates specific skillset questions about their experience with ML frameworks, programming languages, model deployment, and AI project implementations. If the team feels that there’s a fit, then another person from our team will speak with the candidate. If the 2 nexus reps feel that there’s a good fit, then we ask the candidate to complete a 4 question feedback form so we can better understand if the role is a good or great fit. Once we receive the candidate’s feedback, then we will perform a “Lockdown” conversation where we ask a series of questions around counteroffers, interview stages, target salary expectations, and much more. If this goes well, then we will submit the candidate for client review.
First, it is incredibly difficult for AI engineering hiring managers with little time to receive responses to job ads. Second, an increasing number of professionals do not respond to recruiters, particularly in the AI/ML field. They prefer to hear directly from the CTO or Head of Engineering, which brings us to the third challenge: recruitment is a full-time, highly specialized profession for which AI engineering hiring managers do not have time.
Our AI engineering recruiting fee is 22% to 25% of the candidate’s first year base salary. We do our best to find a payment structure that works best for your team.
Our AI engineer recruiters are paid by the companies for which they place candidates. Your AI recruiter does earn a commission if you are hired, but the commission is paid by the company that hires you. Our recruiting fee isn’t taken out of your salary, and it doesn’t lower the salary that you would be offered. Another misconception is that if you are presented by a recruiter, and another candidate is not, that you would be at a disadvantage because you have a fee associated with you getting that role. In our experience, companies are seeking the best person for the job, and they are not concerned about a fee being paid at that point. In fact, candidates that work with recruiters actually tend to make more than those who job hunt alone.