Global production AI engineering — India-based, priced in the open. See the role compensation bands (set above the Indian services-industry median, which is how we keep senior people), the flat 20% delivery layer itemized on every invoice, and the tasks, commits, blockers, and spend as they happen: engineers from $1,300 ≈ €1,100 / £1,000 / A$1,900/month, solution architects from $1,700/month fractional. Timezone overlap for the US, Canada, UK, EU, and Australia. The demo is the easy 80% of an AI product — we own the production 20% too: evals, hardening, cost telemetry, reliability.
20%
Flat delivery layer, itemized
$1,300/mo
Full-time frontend engineer
The production 20%
What you are actually buying
Cheap outsourcing and AI-assisted coding both get you a working demo fast. Production is the other story: evaluation gates, failure handling, cost telemetry, security, reliability. We build the whole thing — and engineer the production 20% that demos hide, which is why our benchmarks publish the failures too.
Vetted marketplaces quote $55-200/hour and keep the split between engineer and platform opaque — reviews estimate 40-60% of every invoice never reaches the engineer. We publish the compensation bands and the 20% delivery layer. You can audit every line.
A senior AI engineer hire runs 3-6 months from req to first commit, plus recruiter fees and equity. A dedicated team plan puts a senior engineer in your standup within two weeks, cancelable monthly, with a swap guarantee and a bench behind every seat.
Build your team
Full-time — dedicated, 40 hrs/wk
QA / Test Engineer
$600/mo
Frontend Engineer
$1,300/mo
Backend + AI Engineer
$1,900/mo
DevOps Engineer
$1,900/mo
AI Research Engineer
$2,500/mo
Solution Architect
$3,100/mo
Fractional — 20 hrs/wk
Fractional DevOps Engineer
$1,000/mo· overage $12/hr
Fractional AI Research Engineer
$1,400/mo· overage $16/hr
Fractional Solution Architect
$1,700/mo· overage $19/hr
Your team, monthly
$1,900 ≈ €1,700 / £1,400 / A$2,700
| 1 × Backend + AI Engineer | ₹1,50,000 (≈ $1,574) |
| Compensation subtotal | ₹1,50,000 (≈ $1,574) |
| NavyaAI delivery layer (20%) | $326 |
| Monthly total (invoiced in USD) | $1,900 |
These are the compensation bands we hire against — above the Indian services-industry median, which is how we keep senior people. The flat 20% delivery layer is itemized on every invoice. Typical staff-augmentation platforms bury a 40–60% markup inside the rate.
Fractional roles include 20 hours/week. Hours beyond the allotment are pre-approved by you and billed at the role's hourly rate shown above — never silently.
Estimate — final quote confirmed on the call. Cancel monthly.
Audit Focus
The first pass is designed to identify the smallest useful intervention: routing, caching, prompt control, serving tuning, or a deeper break-even audit.
List price = role compensation (above the Indian services-industry median) plus a flat 20% delivery layer, rounded to the nearest $100. EUR/GBP/AUD are approximations; invoicing is in USD. The rupee compensation behind each price is shown in the calculator breakdown.
| Role | What's included | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| QA / Test Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: test plans, automation, regression suites, release gates | $600 ≈ €500 / £400 / A$900 |
| Frontend Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: product UI, design systems, performance | $1,300 ≈ €1,100 / £1,000 / A$1,900 |
| Backend + AI Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: APIs, data pipelines, LLM/RAG integration | $1,900 ≈ €1,700 / £1,400 / A$2,700 |
| DevOps Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: CI/CD, infra-as-code, observability, cloud cost hygiene | $1,900 ≈ €1,700 / £1,400 / A$2,700 |
| AI Research Engineer | Full-time, dedicated: model evaluation, fine-tuning, serving optimization, agents | $2,500 ≈ €2,200 / £1,900 / A$3,600 |
| Solution Architect | Full-time, dedicated: system design, architecture reviews, technical leadership | $3,100 ≈ €2,700 / £2,300 / A$4,400 |
| Fractional DevOps Engineer | 20 hrs/week: deploy hygiene, monitoring, infrastructure upkeep | $1,000 ≈ €900 / £700 / A$1,400 · overage $12/hr |
| Fractional AI Research Engineer | 20 hrs/week: eval harnesses, model selection, inference cost tuning | $1,400 ≈ €1,200 / £1,000 / A$2,000 · overage $16/hr |
| Fractional Solution Architect | 20 hrs/week: architecture direction, design reviews, roadmap sanity | $1,700 ≈ €1,500 / £1,300 / A$2,400 · overage $19/hr |
Worked Example
A common starting team: a full-time Backend + AI engineer building the product, with fractional DevOps keeping deploys and infrastructure honest. Here is the entire invoice — compensation in rupees, so you can check it against the Indian market yourself.
| Line | What it is | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| 1 × Backend + AI Engineer (full-time) | Role compensation | ₹1,50,000 (≈ $1,574) |
| 1 × Fractional DevOps (20 hrs/wk) | Role compensation | ₹82,500 (≈ $866) |
| Compensation subtotal | What we pay, before our margin | ₹2,32,500 (≈ $2,440) |
| NavyaAI delivery layer (20%) | Oversight, tooling, replacement guarantee — itemized | $460 |
| Monthly total | Invoiced in USD · cancel or rescale monthly | $2,900 ≈ €2,500 / £2,100 / A$4,100 |
Rounding to the nearest $100 is applied per role list price. The same math powers the calculator above — pick your own roles and check it.
$47K → $28K
Case study: a Llama 3 70B production workload moved from 4 GPUs to 2 with INT8 quantization, KV-cache pruning, and serving changes — a 42% monthly cost cut with 2.3x throughput.
Read the full auditQualified Intake
A 30-minute call maps your roadmap to a team shape — full-time, fractional, or mixed — with the itemized monthly cost confirmed before any commitment. Scale up, down, or cancel monthly.
Founder experience — US roles & engagements at
Code and Theory (Stagwell Group)ProsciaWolframHeyNeoTeCSAR Lab · UNC Charlotte
Shipped Work
Products we've engineered and clients we've served — real platforms in production, not slideware.
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Full-stack platform: Next.js, Postgres, async job pipeline, field-team mobile flows.
Secure AI chatbots for HR, support, and sales — RAG-powered answers from company documents with audit trails, aligned to GDPR and SOC 2 expectations.
RAG platform end to end: ingestion, retrieval, guardrails, multi-tenant serving.
SEO, AEO & GEO intelligence engine for developers — triple scoring, Search Console integration, and CLI-first plus MCP agent workflows.
Agent-first product: MCP server, site crawler, scoring engines, WordPress control plane.
AI creative strategist — learns a brand from its URL and generates on-brand ads, video, and copy built to convert, in minutes.
Generative pipeline: brand ingestion to multi-format creative output.
Programmatic SEO platform — generate, preview, and publish thousands of service + location pages in minutes. Trusted by 500+ SEO professionals.
Page-generation engine: templating, bulk preview, and publishing at 50K+ pages scale.
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FAQ
Full-time: QA/test engineers from $600 ≈ €500 / £400 / A$900/month, frontend from $1,300 ≈ €1,100 / £1,000 / A$1,900/month, backend + AI and DevOps from $1,900 ≈ €1,700 / £1,400 / A$2,700/month, AI research engineers from $2,500 ≈ €2,200 / £1,900 / A$3,600/month, and solution architects from $3,100 ≈ €2,700 / £2,300 / A$4,400/month. Fractional (20 hrs/week) DevOps, AI research, and architecture seats run $1,000-$1,700/month. Every price is the role compensation plus a flat 20% delivery layer, itemized on the invoice.
Geography, priced in the open. Our engineers are India-based, compensated above the Indian services-industry median — the backend + AI band is ₹1,50,000/month — and the flat 20% delivery layer lands the all-in price at $1,900/month. Vetted marketplaces charge $55-200/hour for comparable talent and keep the split private. The cost advantage is geography, not seniority — and we publish the math so you never have to wonder.
The rupee figures are the compensation bands we hire against, deliberately set above the Indian services-industry median. In India these are strong senior packages; paying above market is our retention strategy, and the swap-guarantee record depends on it. Overlap hours with your timezone and disciplined internal processes are how the economics work without cutting the engineer's share.
Automatic AI progress tracking is included with every seat: an AI agent watches your repositories and task boards and sends a daily plain-English report — what each engineer shipped, what's in flight, what's blocked, and hours against plan for fractional seats. Everything stays visible without scheduling a status call — calls happen when they're useful. You also keep direct access: your standups, your Slack, your tracker.
Each invoice shows two lines per seat: the role compensation and NavyaAI's flat 20% delivery layer — vetting, technical oversight, the replacement guarantee, delivery tooling, and payroll operations. The whole layer is itemized, so you always know what you are paying for. Typical staff-augmentation platforms quote a blended hourly rate and keep the split private — independent reviews estimate 40-60% of those rates never reach the engineer.
Nothing silent. Fractional plans include 20 hours/week; if a sprint needs more, we ask first, you approve in writing, and the extra hours bill at the role's fixed hourly rate stated in the contract. No surprise line items, ever.
Most seats are filled from our senior bench within two weeks of the planning call. Every plan includes a swap guarantee: if a seat isn't working, we replace the engineer at no cost, and you can scale down or cancel monthly.
Yes — your repositories, your project tracker, your Slack, your standups, with deliberate timezone overlap for US, Canada, UK, EU, and Australian teams. All work product is yours from the first commit, with IP assignment standard in the contract.
If you have a defined product to prove, start with the 14-day MVP sprint — fixed scope, fixed price. If you have an ongoing roadmap, a team plan is the better economics: the same senior engineers, embedded continuously, at a monthly price you can audit. Many clients sprint first, then convert to a team plan.
