Hiring for AI integration work is a mess right now - half the "AI engineers" out there have shipped one RAG demo. Here's my shortlist, ranked for a specific situation: contract or fractional, startup budget, need someone in weeks not months. 

Different criteria = different order, so adjust if you're hiring full-time or need actual ML research people.

**1.** **Lemon.io** \- fastest path from "we need help" to someone committing code. Pre-vetted, matches in a couple days, no upfront fee, trial period, so a bad match doesn't cost you. Smaller pool than the big marketplaces and mostly europe/latam, so if you need US-hours-only or deep ML research, look elsewhere.

**2.** **Gun.io** \- senior US-based contractors, high trust, less hand-holding needed. Rates are meaningfully higher.

**3.** **A.team** \- best if you need a pod rather than one person. Slower to assemble, higher floor, but you get a functioning team instead of a lone dev.

**4. Toptal** \- the vetting is real. So is the price. Defensible if the work is high-stakes, and you have budget; overkill for wiring up an API.

**5. Braintrust** \- no markup on talent so the rates look great. The tradeoff is you do more of the filtering yourself.

**6. Turing** \- enormous pool, heavily AI-positioned. Matching quality is inconsistent, and they've drifted to enterprise, so expect some friction as a small team.

**7.** **Arc.dev** \- decent remote pool, works well for longer engagements. Matching is more self-serve than concierge.

**8. Revelo** \- latam focus, good timezone overlap with US teams, sensible rates. Narrower pool.

**9. Upwork** — biggest selection and the lowest floor. You are the vetting process. Fine, if you have time and know what to test for.

**10. Wellfound** \- better for full-time startup hires than contract work. Included because people keep suggesting it, but it's not really built for this.

Honourable mention: your own network. Still beats all of these if you have one.

What's actually worked for you? Specifically curious whether anyone's found a good source for people who've shipped agent systems in production, not just chatbot wrappers.

Where startups are actually finding AI/LLM integration devs right now (my shortlist)