Build what matters. Own the outcome.
Join senior builders taking on ambitious AI and product missions for companies that need more than execution. Get close to the problem, make the hard calls, and own what gets shipped.
Builders build for
18 mo
average engagement
12 yrs
median engineering experience
100+
Fortune 500 clients
< 2%
acceptance rate
AI-first by design
Build AI that has to work in the real world
Build agents, ML systems, data infrastructure, and AI-native products that have to perform inside real businesses, with real users, constraints, and stakes.
Past the prototype
Fine-tune on proprietary data. Build retrieval at million-document scale. Design multi-agent workflows that survive real enterprise data, then own the evaluation work that proves it.
Own more than your piece
Work directly with the people closest to the problem. Shape the approach, challenge assumptions, and use your judgment to move the mission forward.
Expertise, not piecework
Half the market now pays engineers by the task to train other people's models. Missions here are the other kind of AI work: production systems you own, at rates that price expertise.
The kind of missions worth saying yes to
Platform, data, and AI work where senior builders are trusted to do more than execute.
Example missions — anonymized from real engagements, not live listings
| ||
|---|---|---|
| Example missions — anonymized from real engagements, not live listings | Discipline | Duration |
| Lead Engineer — Agentic Operations PlatformEnterprise software | AI Agents | 6+ months |
| Senior ML Engineer — Multimodal CommerceGlobal retail | Multimodal | 4+ months |
| AI Product Lead — Workflow AutomationB2B SaaS | Product + AI | 6+ months |
| Data Engineer — Retrieval InfrastructureHealthcare technology | RAG + Data | 3+ months |
| Senior Backend Engineer — Workflow Orchestration MigrationHR technology | Platform | 6+ months |
| Forward Deployed Engineer — Enterprise AI DeploymentAI product company | FDE | 6+ months |
More than a freelance platform
You're matched to missions where your experience and judgment are the reason you're there. No one-off tasks, no race to the lowest rate.
Curated missions
See the full mission details, the team, and the rate range before you apply. If it isn't right, you decline.
Longer engagements
Stay long enough to understand the context, shape the solution, and see what changes because of it. Engagements average 18 months.
Senior peers
You join a small team of experienced builders working alongside the client's own engineers. The architectural calls in your area are yours.
Less admin
Contracts, invoicing, and payments are handled so your energy stays on the mission.
18 years of experience
Software Engineer
Work with the people companies call when the problem gets hard
Build alongside senior engineers, product leaders, designers, and AI specialists who have already solved hard problems at scale.
I love working with pro peers who never cease to impress me.
Inside the network
The knowledge you can't prompt for
An LLM can tell you what a technique is. It can't tell you what happened when someone ran it in production at scale. That's what gets traded here.
The AI/ML Guild
Our highest bar. Entry is evaluation, application, then an interview with a Guild lead. Circles go domain by domain: AI engineering, AI product, CPG, fintech, healthcare, data science. Guild sessions monthly, Circles every other month.
The Knowledge Vault
Where the work comes back out. Sessions get written up and kept: techniques, failure modes, architecture decisions and the reasoning behind them. Open to every builder, not only the Guild.
Credentials we sponsor
A.Team pays for builders to sit Anthropic's Claude Certified Architect exam. Pass our own AI Evaluation and you also carry an AI-Verified badge, which puts you first in line for missions that need proven applied AI.
Set your rate. Get paid on time.
Keep control over your rate, your time, and the missions you take on, without carrying all of the admin that usually comes with independent work.
Choose your missions
Choose the missions that fit your strengths, interests, and availability.
You set your rate
Name your number on every mission, inside the client's posted range. No fees skimmed off your rate.
Guaranteed on-time payments
Covered from your first mission hour, paid twice a month, whether or not the client has paid us. We can promise that because we only take on vetted, verified companies.
Predictable income
More missions are now scoped as monthly retainers: a flat monthly fee for full-time work, so your income doesn't move with the week.
We'll tell you the numbers before you apply
Rates vary by market and by role. Over the last two years, US-based builders on the network booked a median of $115 an hour, with the middle half between $90 and $130. Architect-level and specialist work runs higher. Most missions are scoped as monthly retainers, where engineering roles typically land between $15,500 and $19,000 a month for full-time work.
Those are rates builders actually booked, not a rate card. You still name your own number on every mission.
Senior builders across the product stack
The network is built for experienced builders who can step into complex work and contribute quickly.
- AI & ML Engineers
- AI Architects
- Senior Software Engineers
- Data Engineers & Scientists
- Product Managers
- Engineering Leaders
- Fractional CTOs
- Product Designers
What the builders are figuring out
A look inside the problems, tradeoffs, and lessons A.Team builders are working through on real AI and product missions.
All guides
Field Notes
How to know your AI actually works
A HubSpot principal engineer on the three questions behind LLM evals in production: observability, LLM-as-a-judge on live traffic, and offline eval sets.
Read guide
Field Notes
Every AI coding session forgets what the last one learned
Context engineering is the discipline that stops AI coding gains from resetting every session. How an A.Team team made theirs compound across ten engineers, in production.
Read guide
Rates & Costs
What an AI engineer costs in 2026
Rate benchmarks for senior AI engineers across FTE salary, contractor hourly, and team augmentation models in 2026. Includes the AI premium, specialization tiers, and the hidden costs most rate comparisons miss.
Read guideYour path to building with A.Team
Show us what you've built
Submit your LinkedIn, portfolio, or GitHub. We're looking at production systems, scale, and impact.
Talk with our (human) team
A short call about how you work and what problems you want. Builders with applied AI depth also take the AI Evaluation, a technical conversation with a senior practitioner and the route to AI-Verified.
Apply to high-impact missions
Curated and matched to your expertise, with scope, team and rate range visible before you commit.
Build with top-tier peers
Matched teams working alongside the client's own engineers. You own the calls in your area from day one.
Got questions? We have answers.
Under 2% of applicants are accepted. The bar protects the caliber of the network and the missions people get matched to. The network is 11,000+ builders today.
Yes: AI engineers, AI architects, and AI product managers, plus data engineers and scientists on AI-adjacent missions. Applied-AI builders go through a second bar, the AI Evaluation, which earns the AI-Verified badge.
Classical ML depth counts. Plenty of the hardest production problems are retrieval, ranking, and pipeline reliability rather than prompting. What matters is that something you built ran in production.
Yes. Platform, backend, data and infrastructure missions run alongside the AI work, and plenty of the AI missions are won or lost on the systems underneath them.
Yes. Some missions are forward-deployed: you're embedded in a delivery, inside the customer's environment and constraints. Remote counts. A.Team doesn't certify the role today, so treat anyone selling you an FDE credential with suspicion.
You name your rate per mission inside the client's posted range, and payments are guaranteed from your first mission hour, twice a month, whether or not the client has paid us. Increasingly, missions are scoped as monthly retainers instead of hourly.
Yes. Part-time missions and concurrent missions are both supported; working-hours overlap is agreed per mission and visible before you apply.
Most run 12 to 18 months, part-time to full-time. Scope is shared before you commit.
Almost always. Some missions carry location requirements for data security, compliance, or tax reasons.
Where senior builders do their best work
Ambitious AI and product missions with senior peers and real ownership.