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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Production ML systems depend on more than just modelers. An AI Data Analyst turns model outputs into business signal, an AI Automation Engineer wires models into operational workflows, and a Knowledge Engineer structures the proprietary knowledge your models reason over. Supervised learning and RAG pipelines also need a Data Annotation Specialist to build clean, labeled training sets, and chat-based products benefit from a Conversation Designer to shape how the model actually talks to users.
A Machine Learning Engineer ships ML models to production: data pipelines, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and the infrastructure that keeps models fresh. They sit between data science (which proves a model works) and software engineering (which ships systems), and they own the path from notebook to API. The role demands strong software fundamentals, ML literacy, and the operational chops to keep models reliable.
ML Engineers are among the highest-paid software hires. Expect an average U.S. salary of $11,000 per month compared with an average Latin American salary of $5,500 per month, creating potential savings of up to 50%. LatAm has built a deep ML talent pool from CS programs and direct industry experience, with engineers shipping production ML at U.S. companies for years.
Yes, ML engineering has been remote-friendly since the cloud-ML stack matured. South contracts the engineer locally, runs payroll and compliance, and bills you monthly. They join your GitHub, MLflow or Weights & Biases, and Slack day one. Time-zone alignment matters for code review and pair debugging on production model issues.
Strong Python and SQL, fluency with one ML framework (PyTorch or TensorFlow), and end-to-end pipeline experience (training to serving). Look for someone who has shipped models to production, not just trained them in notebooks. Run a system-design interview on a real ML problem (recommendations, fraud, NLP) and see how they think about data, features, eval, and ops.
Python with PyTorch or TensorFlow, scikit-learn, and pandas. SQL on data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery). MLflow or Weights & Biases for experiment tracking. Airflow, Prefect, or Dagster for orchestration. Docker and Kubernetes for deployment. Hugging Face for transformers. AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex, or Azure ML for managed training and serving.
An AI Engineer typically works at the application layer with foundation models: prompts, RAG, agents, fine-tuning. An ML Engineer works deeper in the stack: training custom models, building feature stores, owning ML infrastructure. They overlap on deployment and ops. For LLM-heavy products, hire an AI Engineer. For custom ML on your own data, hire an ML Engineer.
South vets LatAm ML engineers through technical interviews, take-home modeling exercises, and system-design rounds. 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.
