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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A LLM Engineer owns the full lifecycle of large language model features inside a product. That includes choosing between closed models like GPT 4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini versus open weights like Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5, and Mistral, running evaluations to figure out which one wins on your actual workload, and then wiring the chosen model into an application with the right latency, cost, and safety profile. Day to day they are writing prompt systems, building evaluation harnesses in frameworks like Promptfoo, Braintrust, or Inspect, setting up tracing with Langfuse or Arize Phoenix, and running structured A/B tests on production traffic.
The heavier work shows up in fine tuning and inference. LLM Engineers handle supervised fine tuning, LoRA and QLoRA adaptation, preference optimization with DPO or KTO, and occasionally full RLHF pipelines when the product warrants it. On the serving side they deploy with vLLM, TGI, SGLang, or TensorRT LLM, tune batch sizes and KV cache settings, and squeeze GPU utilization until cost per million tokens lands where the CFO wants it. Good ones also own the guardrail layer: jailbreak detection, PII redaction, content filtering, and structured output validation with libraries like Instructor, Outlines, or BAML.
The outcome is always the same. A feature that uses a model, works reliably, costs what the business model can absorb, and has enough telemetry that when it breaks at 2am the team can actually diagnose it.
The field moves weekly, so hiring criteria should weight fundamentals over specific tool familiarity.
Seniority breakdown. Junior (1-2 years) engineers can build a working prompt pipeline, call OpenAI and Anthropic APIs well, and run basic evals under supervision. Mid level (3-5 years) engineers own a feature end to end including fine tuning, inference setup, and evaluation, and can debug production LLM issues without help. Senior (5+ years) engineers set the LLM strategy for a product area, mentor the team, own platform decisions like model routing and inference infrastructure, and are comfortable making tradeoffs between cost, latency, and quality at the architecture level.
An LLM Engineer builds production systems on top of large language models: prompt engineering, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation pipelines, and model deployment. They handle the engineering between the model and the product, including cost, latency, and reliability.
U.S. salaries for this role have climbed sharply in recent years. LLM Engineers in the U.S. command an average U.S. salary of $18,000 per month compared with an average Latin American salary of $9,000 per month, creating potential savings of up to 50%. The LatAm talent pool is deep across countries like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, and most candidates South places have direct experience supporting U.S. companies.
Yes, and most U.S. teams already do. South contracts the LLM Engineer locally, handles compliance and payroll, and bills you monthly. The hire joins your tools, standups, and Slack like a domestic teammate. Time-zone alignment is the unlock: same-day collaboration without the async lag of EMEA or APAC.
Real production LLM experience including evals, RAG, and either fine-tuning or fine-tuned-vendor work. Strong Python, comfort with PyTorch, and a security-aware approach to prompt injection and PII handling. Look for engineers who have shipped, not just demoed.
The standard stack varies by team, but expect fluency with: Python, PyTorch, OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, vLLM, LangChain, Pinecone, Weights & Biases. Beyond tools, look for judgment about when to reach for which tool, and the discipline to document choices for the next person on the project.
A Machine Learning Engineer covers traditional ML alongside deep learning. An LLM Engineer focuses on language models specifically. For LLM-first products, the specialist is the right hire.
South sources LatAm LLM engineers from teams shipping production AI features. You see a shortlist in seven to ten days and onboard inside three weeks. 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.
