Some of the strongest applied AI work in the world is being done in China, by engineers who are not on the UK or US market at any salary. They stay where they are, work directly for your team, and you pay one invoice from a UK company.
Not because it is cheap. Because the depth of applied AI expertise is real, and a great deal of it never reaches a Western job market.
Chinese institutions and labs publish heavily across large language models, diffusion, multimodal learning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. We look for people whose papers and repositories you can actually read.
For narrow specialisms — training at scale, model compression, inference optimisation — the number of people in the UK who have genuinely done it is small enough to name. In China it is a market.
Engineers from the large Chinese platforms have shipped models to user bases that make most Western traffic look like a staging environment. That experience does not transfer from a course.
Hiring in the UK instead, or as well? See our AI & machine learning practice, where we cover 150 specific AI and ML roles, or the live IT jobs board.
The engineer works for you. The money and the contracting come through us, so that the awkward part is not your problem.
Skills, seniority, the overlap hours you need, and anything your security or legal team requires us to know up front.
You run your own process and make your own call. We do not decide who is good enough for you.
You contract with our UK limited company. We contract with and pay the engineer. You get a single invoice in sterling, or in dollars if you prefer.
Your standups, your backlog, your code review, your tooling. We are not in the delivery loop and do not want to be.
Each links to our full guide to hiring for that role.
Better raised on the first call than the week before a start date. We would rather lose an engagement than land you with a problem.
Assignment has to be effective under the law governing the engineer's contract, not only yours. The chain runs engineer → us → you, with assignment at each step. Ask for the wording and give it to your counsel before signing.
Giving a China-based person access to certain model weights, training infrastructure or chip-design tooling can be a controlled export even with no relocation, and US rules are stricter than UK ones. If your work sits near that line, get specialist advice — we will say so rather than stay quiet.
Personal data reaching China is an international transfer under UK GDPR and needs the usual mechanism and assessment. China's PIPL and data-export rules apply coming back. Often the cleanest answer is to scope the work so no production personal data is involved at all.
Least-privilege repository access, a segmented environment, no standing production access. This is the practical answer to most of the above, and it is much easier to design before day one than to retrofit.
None of the above is legal advice, and it is not a substitute for your own. It is the list we work through with every client so that nothing on it arrives as a surprise.
Hourly, in pounds, invoiced by our UK company. Final rate depends on the specialism, the seniority and the overlap hours you need.
from £40/hr
approx. $53/hr
Three to six years shipping models into production. Comfortable owning a service end to end.
from £60/hr
approx. $80/hr
Seven years or more. Leads a workstream, sets technical direction, mentors without being asked.
from £70/hr
approx. $93/hr
Published work in a relevant area. Reads the papers, reproduces them, and knows which ones do not replicate.
from £85/hr
approx. $113/hr
Owns an entire AI function. Has taken something from a research idea to a system with users on it.
US clients welcome — we invoice in sterling or dollars. Dollar figures above are a guide only, converted at £1 = $1.33; ask us for a firm figure rather than working from the conversion.
This is not a low-cost-offshore proposition, and we would rather you heard that from us. China is a premium market for AI talent — engineers at the large Chinese labs earn close to Western salaries — so the saving against a UK hire is small and against a US hire it is modest. What you are buying is access to expertise that is genuinely hard to find here, not a discount. If cost reduction is the goal, say so on the first call and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right route.
Rates reviewed September 2026. For a firm quote against a specific role, tell us what you need. Market context for UK salaries is in our hiring insights.
Describe the role and the constraints you are working under. If we are not the right route for it, we will tell you that instead of selling you one.
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