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 Developer builds AI-powered features in production software: integrating model APIs, building RAG pipelines, shipping agents, and writing the application code that connects LLMs to real users. They sit at the intersection of full-stack engineering and AI literacy, and the role is one of the most in-demand titles in tech right now. The good ones combine strong software fundamentals with the discipline to handle non-deterministic systems well.
AI Developer salaries land 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 produced a strong AI developer bench from full-stack and ML engineering backgrounds, with engineers shipping production AI features for U.S. SaaS companies.
Yes, AI development is fully remote-friendly. South contracts the developer locally, runs payroll and compliance, and bills you monthly. They join your GitHub, Notion, and observability stack day one. Time-zone alignment matters for prompt iteration and live debugging of streaming responses.
Strong full-stack fundamentals (Python or Node, plus React), fluency with model APIs, and a security-first mindset for prompt injection and PII handling. Look for engineers who have shipped production AI features and can walk through cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs. Run a small live coding exercise: build a streaming chat endpoint with retries.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-source model APIs. LangChain, LlamaIndex, or homegrown orchestration. Python with FastAPI, Node with Hono, or TypeScript with Next.js on the back end. Pinecone, Weaviate, or pgvector for retrieval. Vercel, AWS, or GCP for hosting. LangSmith or Braintrust for evals. PostgreSQL on the data side.
An AI Engineer is the broader title and often skews more toward ML infrastructure, training, and platform work. An AI Developer focuses on shipping AI features in application code: RAG, chat, agents, integrations. They overlap on day-to-day work. For platform-level AI work, hire an Engineer. For shipping AI features in product, hire a Developer.
South vets LatAm AI developers through technical interviews, take-home coding tasks, 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.
