South helps growing companies find, hire, and pay top Latin American talent. Build high-performing teams in 21 days or less.
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An AI App Developer builds the user-facing application layer of AI products: chat UIs, agentic workflows, RAG-backed search, AI copilots, and the back-end services that power them. They blend full-stack development with LLM integration, working across React or Next.js on the front end and Python, Node, or Go on the back end with OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source models in between. The role is the production engineer for AI-native products.
AI App Developers earn near the top of the developer market. Expect an average U.S. salary of $10,800 per month compared with an average Latin American salary of $5,000 per month, creating potential savings of up to 54%. LatAm has built a strong AI App development bench from full-stack and AI engineering backgrounds, with engineers shipping production AI applications for U.S. SaaS companies.
Yes, AI app development is fully remote-friendly. South contracts the developer locally, runs payroll and compliance, and bills you monthly. They join your GitHub, Linear, Vercel, and Slack day one. Time-zone alignment helps for live debugging of streaming responses and pair programming on prompts.
Strong full-stack chops (React/Next.js plus Python or Node), fluency with model APIs and streaming, and a security-first mindset (prompt injection, PII leakage). Look for someone who has shipped production AI features and can walk through cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs. Run a paired exercise: build a streaming chat endpoint with retries and error handling.
Next.js or React on the front end. Python with FastAPI, Node with Hono, or Go on the back end. OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-source model APIs. Vercel AI SDK for streaming. Pinecone, Weaviate, or pgvector for retrieval. PostgreSQL on the data side. Vercel, AWS, or GCP for hosting. LangSmith or Braintrust for evals.
An AI Engineer is broader and may live at any layer: data pipelines, training, model serving, application code. An AI App Developer specializes in the user-facing layer: front-end, application back-end, model integration. If your AI work spans models, infra, and product, hire an AI Engineer. If you're shipping AI products as features, hire an AI App Developer.
South vets LatAm AI App developers through technical interviews, take-home coding exercises, and pair programming on real LLM features. You see a shortlist in seven to ten days, run your own interviews, and onboard inside two to three weeks. South handles the contract, monthly payments, and a replacement guarantee. Schedule a free call here to get started!
The region has the perfect mix of everything you want in remote employees: English skills, shared time zones, hard-working, and depth of talent. They are already accustomed to working remotely for top US startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Absolutely! The US and Latin America have basically the same time zones. No Latin American city is more than two hours ahead of EST.
Every hire is sourced based on your exact needs. They will arrive ready to support your business right away. They can do basically any tasks done remotely, but we recommend starting them as support so your team has more bandwidth for high-value strategic tasks.
All types of roles - customer service, executive assistant, sales, accounting, email marketing, lead generation, content writers, operations, social media marketing, and more!
You can pay directly through us (most popular) or we can connect you with one of our payroll partners.
You don't have to deal with any American labor laws / taxes when hiring full-time remote contractors. They aren't US-based, so no visas or sponsorships to deal with either.
We recommend market pay which varies for each role. See our salary guide and success stories for some ideas.
Then, we have two different models:
Staffing (most popular) - We charge a small monthly fee for each employee's monthly salary to make the process hassle-free. The fee covers sourcing, recruiting, admin, payroll, compliance, ongoing support, and a free replacement if necessary at any point. There are no cancellation fees or minimum commitments. You only pay if you make a hire.
Headhunting - A one-time simple fee once we've found the perfect candidate. This comes with a 120-day replacement guarantee.
For both options, you only pay something if we find you someone great that you want to hire.
Yes, we only recruit for full-time and we strongly recommend full-time hiring if you can. Stability (full-time & long-term) is highly sought after abroad. The top caliber candidates are only looking for full-time work.
You're also going to spend time training and getting them up to speed on your processes. It would be a waste to do that over and over again with new people all the time.
We recommend training new hires on one thing at a time.
For example, once they get up to speed on lead generation, you can add the next role writing blog posts or whatever you'd like. You can definitely overlap roles until you have enough work for multiple people.
The cost of living is much less in Latin American countries. Many of our employees are able to own homes, raise families, provide for their parents, and have in-home help of their own with their salaries.
If you aren't happy with your hire in the first 120 days, we will work with you to conduct a second round of search for the same role for free.
Just email us at Hello@HireInSouth.com and we will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.
