AI Recruiter, NYC
Engineers in AI is an NYC-based technical recruiting firm focused on AI, ML, and LLM teams. Founder Tony Kochhar spent 20 years building engineering organizations before he ever ran a search, and every placement still passes through his desk.
If you are looking for an AI recruiter in New York, you have dozens of options. Most of them will pitch the same network, pull from the same LinkedIn pool, and send the same ten candidates that already bounced from three other searches. That is not what we do.
Engineers in AI is a boutique firm based in Manhattan. We have closed more than 1,000 placements over two decades, with a flat 20% fee, no retainer, and no exclusivity required. Every search is led by Tony Kochhar, who built and managed engineering teams at scale before moving into recruiting. That background is why our AI searches tend to close faster than the market average, and why the engineers we place tend to stick.
AI hiring in New York is not the same game as San Francisco or Austin. The NY AI scene is denser, more finance-adjacent, and more hybrid-first than most people realize. A hedge fund in Midtown is competing for the same ML engineer as a seed-stage RAG startup in Flatiron and a media company in Hudson Yards. Compensation ranges compress and stretch depending on which pocket you are pulling from.
A recruiter who does not live in that context will miss the nuance. We spend real time with NYC AI founders, we know which teams are losing engineers and which are ramping, and we know what a competitive offer looks like this quarter, not last year. When a candidate asks whether your comp is market, we can answer without guessing.
We take on searches across the AI engineering stack, weighted toward production roles. A typical month includes:
We do not run volume pipelines for junior data science seats or pure research roles with no shipping component. If you need 10 prompt engineers fast, a bigger agency is a better fit. If you need one or two senior AI engineers who can own a system, we are probably the right call.
Most AI recruiters screen on resume signals. GitHub stars, paper count, company logos. Those signals are noisy. A candidate can have a Meta logo and still have never shipped an inference service at scale. A candidate can have no public profile at all and be the most productive ML engineer in Brooklyn.
We screen differently. Tony personally runs the first technical call on every senior AI search. He will ask about the last production ML system the candidate owned end to end. How did they monitor drift? Who paged them when inference latency spiked? What was the P95 before and after they joined? When a candidate fumbles those questions, we do not forward the resume. That screen is why our clients tell us they rarely see a filler candidate in our submittals.
We have run searches for NYC-based and NYC-adjacent teams across travel, media, utilities, and enterprise SaaS, including engagements with Agoda, Hearst, Con Edison, and Trilogy. Our client list skews toward teams that care about production quality over headcount, which is a useful filter on both sides.
We do not publish a long client logo wall. We are a small firm, and we take the handful of searches we can actually deliver on. If we do not think we can fill your role within 60 days, we will tell you during the first call.
Compensation for AI engineers in New York has stopped looking like regular software engineer compensation. A strong LLM engineer with two or three years of shipped work can clear $350K total comp at a mid-stage team and $500K+ at the top end of the market, before equity. Founding AI engineers at well-funded seed-stage startups are seeing 1% to 2% equity grants that have meaningful upside in a two-year horizon.
Most hiring managers we talk to have a comp band from six months ago. In this market that is already off. Part of what we bring to a first call is a current read on what offers are actually being accepted, and what offers are quietly being ignored. If your band is low, you will find out in week two of submittals. We would rather you find out on the first call.
The terms are simple. A flat 20% placement fee, billed only on a hire. A 90-day replacement guarantee, no extra cost. No retainer, no exclusivity, no minimum commitment. You can run us alongside your internal team or other agencies, and we will not care. What we do care about is that the first call with you is structured well enough that we leave understanding the role the way an engineer on the team would describe it.
That first call is usually 45 minutes. We walk through the technical scope, the team, the tradeoffs you have already made, and the candidates who have bounced so far. By the end of the call, we know whether we can help. If we cannot, we will say so and, when possible, refer you to someone who can.
If you are hiring AI engineers in New York and you want a recruiter who reads the code, talks to engineers the way engineers talk to each other, and bills you only when a candidate actually starts, book a hiring call. We will spend 45 minutes on your role with no pitch and no obligation, and you will leave with a clear read on whether a boutique firm is the right fit for your search.
Founder-led searches. Flat 20% fee. 90-day replacement. No retainer.