How to Hire an AI Engineer to Build Your SaaS Product

AI is on every pitch deck. But most "AI products" are thin wrappers around ChatGPT with no real architecture. If you are hiring an AI engineer for your SaaS, you need someone who understands backends, costs, and reliability — not just prompts.

Common AI features clients want built

• Document Q&A (RAG) over PDFs, docs, or internal knowledge bases.
• AI chat assistants embedded in existing products.
• Content generation (posts, emails, reports) with templates and guardrails.
• Classification, extraction, and summarization pipelines.
• AI-powered search and recommendations.

Questions to ask an AI engineer

1. How do you reduce hallucinations in production?
2. How do you handle OpenAI rate limits and costs at scale?
3. Explain your RAG pipeline — chunking, embeddings, retrieval.
4. How do you evaluate output quality before launch?
5. Show me a live AI feature you shipped — not a demo video.

Realistic timelines and costs

Simple chatbot with custom knowledge: 2–4 weeks, $3k–$8k. Full RAG system with admin upload, auth, and analytics: 4–8 weeks, $8k–$20k. AI is not magic — data prep and evaluation take as long as the model integration.

AI products I have built

NAIJA GPT (AI football app on Google Play), Boom Tech (lender comparison), PayParrot (fintech + AI), AdhereWell (health adherence with smart workflows), Siwi (voice assistant with Claude). Production AI means monitoring, fallbacks, and cost controls — not just API calls.