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Dware

AI & vibe coding

Hire AI developers who turn models into features your users trust

Our AI developers build LLM apps, chatbots, search over your company data and AI agents that take real actions. They use model APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, or open-source models, and they measure quality, cost and speed before anything ships. You get a working prototype fast and a production system you can rely on.

  • Working AI prototype on your own data in 1–2 weeks
  • Evaluations and guardrails built in, not bolted on
  • Model-agnostic: OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or open source

Overview

What AI developers build, and why it's harder than calling an API

Calling a large language model takes a few lines of code. Building an AI feature people trust is a different job. A good AI developer knows how to give the model the right context, get structured output your software can use, stop it from making things up, keep answers fast and keep the monthly API bill under control. They also know when a simpler, non-AI solution is the better choice.

Most business AI projects fall into a few patterns. Chat assistants that answer customer or staff questions. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where the model searches your documents, help center or database and answers with sources. Document extraction that turns invoices, contracts or forms into clean data. And AI agents that use tools, such as looking up an order, drafting a reply or updating a CRM record, to finish a task across several steps.

What separates a demo from a product is measurement. Models are not deterministic, and a prompt that works on ten examples can fail on the eleventh. Our AI developers build an evaluation set from your real data early, then score every change to prompts, models or retrieval against it. That is how we know a new model is actually better, or that a cheaper one is good enough, rather than guessing.

When you hire AI developers from Dware, you get senior engineers who build the whole system, not just the prompt: data pipelines, APIs, user interface, monitoring and security. We work with OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini and open-source models such as Llama, Mistral and Qwen, and we design so you can switch providers later. Code lives in your repository, and your data stays under your control.

What we build

AI development services: what our AI developers build

We build AI features into existing products and new AI-first products from scratch. These are the projects our AI developers take on most often.

  • LLM apps and AI chatbots

    Customer support assistants, onboarding guides, sales assistants and internal help desks that answer in your tone of voice. We add streaming responses, conversation memory, handoff to a human and clear limits on what the bot will and won't do.

  • RAG over your company data

    Question answering and search across your help center, PDFs, wikis, tickets and databases, with links to the sources behind every answer. We build the ingestion pipeline, chunking, embeddings, hybrid search and re-ranking, and respect each user's existing access rights.

  • AI agents and tool use

    Agents that call your APIs to look up data, create records, send drafts or run reports, using function calling and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). We keep humans in the loop for risky actions and log every step so you can see exactly what the agent did.

  • Document extraction and processing

    Turn invoices, receipts, contracts, medical forms or applications into structured JSON that matches your schema. We combine OCR and vision models with validation rules, confidence scores and a review queue for the cases the model isn't sure about.

  • Classification, routing and summaries

    Tag and route support tickets, flag risky messages, summarise calls and long threads, or score leads. These smaller features are often the fastest wins, and they can run on cheaper, faster models with batch processing.

  • Evaluations and guardrails for existing AI features

    Already shipped something with AI? We build test sets, automated scoring and monitoring around it, add input and output guardrails and fix the failure cases. You get numbers for accuracy, cost and speed instead of anecdotes.

  • Cost and latency optimisation

    We cut AI bills and response times with prompt caching, smaller models for simple steps, batching, response streaming and smarter retrieval that sends fewer tokens. Every change is checked against your evaluation set, so quality doesn't drop.

  • Private and open-source model deployments

    When data can't leave your environment, we run open-source models such as Llama, Mistral or Qwen on your own cloud with vLLM or Ollama, or use private cloud options like Azure OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex AI. We size the hardware to your traffic and measure quality against hosted models first.

Our process

How our AI developers build your AI feature, step by step

AI projects fail when teams jump straight to code and judge results by feel. Our process puts data and measurement first, so you see early whether the idea works and exactly how good it is before it reaches users.

  1. 1

    Discovery: pick the right problem and define success

    We start by understanding the task the AI should do, who uses it and what a wrong answer costs. Then we decide together whether this needs an LLM at all, or whether search, rules or a classic machine learning model would do better. We agree on success measures you can count, such as the share of tickets resolved without a human, extraction accuracy per field or answer time. We also collect 50 to 200 real examples, which become the first evaluation set.

    What you get

    • Use case and risk summary
    • Success metrics
    • First evaluation dataset
  2. 2

    Data audit and feasibility prototype

    Next we look at the data the AI will rely on: your documents, tickets, database tables or forms. We check quality, formats, permissions and anything sensitive that must be masked. In one to two weeks we build a rough prototype, often a simple internal web page, that runs the real task on your real data with two or three candidate models. You see actual answers and our first scores, so you can decide with evidence whether to go ahead.

    What you get

    • Data quality and privacy notes
    • Working prototype on your data
    • First model comparison
  3. 3

    Architecture and model choice

    With the prototype as proof, we design the production system. That covers which models to use for which step, how retrieval works (a vector database such as pgvector, Pinecone or Qdrant, often with keyword search alongside), how tools and permissions are exposed to agents, and where prompts and configuration live. We plan for failure: timeouts, fallbacks to a second provider, rate limits and what the user sees when the model is unsure. We keep the model layer thin so you can switch providers without a rewrite.

    What you get

    • Architecture diagram
    • Model and vendor choices with reasons
    • Security and data-flow plan
  4. 4

    Build the full feature

    We build the pipeline end to end: ingestion and chunking for RAG, structured outputs validated against a schema, tool definitions for agents and the user interface with streaming responses. Prompts are versioned in code, not pasted into a dashboard. Every request is traced with tools like Langfuse or LangSmith, so we can see the exact context, model response, tokens used and latency for any answer. Work lands as small pull requests with senior code review on every change.

    What you get

    • Production code in your repository
    • Versioned prompts and schemas
    • Request tracing set up
  5. 5

    Evaluate, red-team and add guardrails

    We run the full evaluation set on every significant change and track scores over time. Depending on the task we use exact checks, rule-based checks and LLM-as-judge scoring that we calibrate against human ratings. We then try to break the system on purpose with prompt injection, attempts to leak data or the system prompt, and off-topic or harmful requests. Guardrails are added where needed: input filters, output checks, PII masking, allow-lists for agent actions and human approval steps.

    What you get

    • Evaluation report with scores
    • Red-team findings and fixes
    • Guardrails in place
  6. 6

    Launch with a gradual rollout

    We release to a small group first, often internal staff or a percentage of users behind a feature flag. We watch quality, cost per request, latency and user feedback such as thumbs up or down. Alerts flag spikes in errors, spend or slow responses. Once the numbers match what we saw in testing, we roll out to everyone. If something goes wrong, the feature flag lets us switch it off in seconds.

    What you get

    • Staged rollout plan
    • Monitoring and cost alerts
    • Launch review
  7. 7

    Improve, maintain and keep up with new models

    AI features need care after launch. Real conversations reveal new failure cases, which we add to the evaluation set and fix. New models are released often, so we test them against your evals and switch only when they are better, cheaper or faster for your task. We also keep your RAG index fresh as documents change. You can keep the same developer on for post-launch support with flexible terms.

    What you get

    • Growing evaluation set
    • Model upgrade reports
    • Ongoing support

Want this process for your project? Tell us what you're building and get a free, fixed quote.

Get a free quote

Technical expertise

AI development expertise: the details that make it work in production

Most of the work in a reliable AI feature happens around the model. These are the areas where our AI developers spend their time, and where many AI projects quietly go wrong.

Retrieval that finds the right context

Most wrong answers in RAG systems come from retrieval, not from the model. We chunk documents along their real structure, such as headings and sections, add metadata like dates and product names, and combine vector search with keyword search so exact terms and codes are found. A re-ranking step then picks the best passages. We measure retrieval separately from answers, so we know which part to fix.

Structured outputs and reliable tool use

Software needs predictable data, not free text. We use the structured output and function calling features of each provider, validate every response against a schema with tools like Zod or Pydantic and retry or fall back when validation fails. For agents, we keep tool sets small and clearly described, cap the number of steps and require approval for actions that spend money, send messages or change records.

Evaluations you can trust

We treat evals like unit tests for AI. Each project gets a dataset of real inputs with expected results, a set of automatic checks and, where judgment is needed, LLM-as-judge scoring checked against human labels. Evals run in CI when prompts or models change. This turns questions like whether to switch to a newer model into a quick, measurable decision.

Security, privacy and guardrails

LLM apps bring new risks, listed in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications. The biggest is prompt injection, where text in a document or email tries to hijack the model. We never let model output run with more permission than the user has, we separate trusted instructions from untrusted content, and we mask personal data before it reaches the model when it isn't needed. We use API plans whose terms exclude your data from model training, and offer private deployments when required.

Cost and latency control

AI costs scale with tokens, so we send less of them. We use prompt caching for long, repeated instructions, route simple steps to small fast models, batch offline work and trim retrieved context to what matters. For speed, we stream responses so users see text right away and run independent steps in parallel. Every optimisation is checked against the evals, so savings never come at the cost of quality.

Choosing between providers and open-source models

OpenAI, Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini each have strengths, and open-source models like Llama, Mistral and Qwen can be cheaper or private when hosted yourself. We compare them on your own eval set rather than public leaderboards. We build behind a thin abstraction, for example with the Vercel AI SDK or LiteLLM, so changing providers is a configuration change, not a rewrite.

Skills and tools our AI developers use

Models and AI APIs

  • OpenAI API
  • Anthropic Claude API
  • Google Gemini API
  • Azure OpenAI
  • Amazon Bedrock
  • Google Vertex AI
  • Llama
  • Mistral
  • Qwen

Frameworks and orchestration

  • Vercel AI SDK
  • LangChain
  • LangGraph
  • LlamaIndex
  • LiteLLM
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP)
  • Pydantic
  • Zod

Retrieval and data

  • pgvector
  • PostgreSQL
  • Pinecone
  • Qdrant
  • Weaviate
  • Elasticsearch
  • Unstructured
  • Redis

Evaluation, tracing and guardrails

  • Langfuse
  • LangSmith
  • Braintrust
  • promptfoo
  • Ragas
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Sentry

Application and deployment

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • TypeScript
  • Next.js
  • Node.js
  • Docker
  • vLLM
  • Ollama
  • AWS
  • Google Cloud

Why Dware

Why hire AI developers from Dware

Production engineers, not prompt tinkerers

Our AI developers are senior software engineers who build the whole system: data pipelines, APIs, interface, monitoring and security, not just the prompt.

Measured quality

Every project gets an evaluation set built from your data. You see accuracy, cost and speed as numbers, and every change is checked before it ships.

No vendor lock-in

We design so you can switch between OpenAI, Claude, Gemini and open-source models as prices and quality change, without rewriting your product.

Your data stays yours

Code lives in your repository, accounts are in your name and you own all code and IP. We sign an NDA on request and keep sensitive data out of prompts unless it is needed.

Fast proof, then scale

Start with a working prototype on your own data in a couple of weeks. If it proves its value, scale the team up or down monthly as the project grows.

Ways to work with us

Ways to hire AI developers

Hire one developer, add a whole team, or hand us a fixed-scope project. Tell us what you need and we'll send a free, fixed quote, usually within one business day.

Dedicated developer

Most popular

A senior engineer who works only on your product, full-time or part-time.

  • Joins your Slack, standups and Git
  • Same developer every day
  • Scale up or down monthly

Team extension

Two or more developers, plus QA or a tech lead, added to your team.

  • Matched to your stack and time zone
  • One point of contact
  • Add or remove people any month

Fixed-scope project

A clear scope, timeline and fixed quote. Ideal for MVPs, apps and fixes.

  • Free, fixed quote before we start
  • Milestones you approve
  • Support after launch

FAQ

Hire AI developers: frequently asked questions

What does an AI developer do?

An AI developer builds software features powered by AI models, most often large language models. Day to day that means designing prompts and structured outputs, building retrieval over company data, connecting models to tools and APIs, setting up evaluations and guardrails and shipping it all as reliable production code. Unlike a data scientist who trains models, most AI developers today build on top of existing models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, or on open-source models.

How much does it cost to hire AI developers?

Cost depends on the use case and how far you want to take it. A feasibility prototype on your data is a small, focused project. A production system with RAG over many sources, agent actions, strict privacy rules or private model hosting takes more time and people. Data quality, integrations, accuracy targets and your timeline all play a part. After a short call we give you a free, fixed quote, and we can also estimate your ongoing model API costs.

Should we use OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or an open-source model?

It depends on your task, data rules and budget, and the answer changes as new models come out. We don't pick by reputation. In the prototype phase we run your real examples through two or three candidates and compare accuracy, speed and cost on your evaluation set. Often the result is a mix, such as a strong model for hard reasoning and a small, cheap one for simple steps. We build so you can switch later without a rewrite.

What is RAG, and do we need it?

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) means the system first searches your own content, such as docs, tickets or a database, and then gives the most relevant passages to the model to answer from. It lets the AI answer about your products and policies with sources, without training a custom model, and it updates as soon as your documents change. If your AI needs to know things that are specific to your company, you almost certainly need RAG rather than fine-tuning.

How do you stop the AI from making things up?

We reduce hallucinations in layers. Retrieval gives the model the right facts, and prompts tell it to answer only from those facts and to say when it doesn't know. Answers include citations users can check. Structured outputs are validated against a schema. Our evaluation set includes questions with no answer in your data, so we can measure how often the model admits it doesn't know. For high-stakes tasks we add human review before anything is sent or saved.

Is our data safe with AI models?

It can be, with the right setup. We use business API plans whose terms say your data is not used to train the provider's models, and we keep sensitive fields out of prompts when they aren't needed. Retrieval respects each user's existing permissions, so the AI can't reveal documents a user couldn't open themselves. When data must stay in your environment, we use Azure OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, Vertex AI or self-hosted open-source models. We sign an NDA on request.

Can you build AI agents that take actions in our systems?

Yes. We build agents that use tools such as your APIs, CRM, ticketing system or database through function calling or MCP. We start with read-only tools and add write actions one at a time, each with clear limits. Risky actions like sending emails, issuing refunds or changing records go through human approval until the agent has proven itself in your evals and in a staged rollout. Every step is logged so you can review what the agent did and why.

How long does it take to build an AI feature?

A feasibility prototype running on your real data usually takes one to two weeks. A focused production feature, such as a support assistant over your help center or an extraction pipeline for one document type, typically ships in four to ten weeks. Larger systems with many data sources, several agent tools or strict compliance needs take longer. The prototype phase gives us real numbers, so the production timeline is based on evidence rather than hope.

We already built an AI prototype. Can you take it to production?

Yes, this is very common. We start by building an evaluation set from your real data and measuring the prototype as it stands, so we know where it fails. Then we fix the weak points, which are usually retrieval quality, missing error handling, no guardrails and high cost per request, and add tracing, monitoring and a staged rollout. If your prototype was built quickly with AI coding tools, our vibe code fixers can help clean up the surrounding app too.

Who owns the code, prompts and data?

You do. Code, prompts, evaluation sets and configuration all live in your own repository, and all code and IP are assigned to you. Model API accounts, vector databases and hosting are set up under your company. That means you can switch providers, bring the work in-house or move to another team at any time without losing anything.

Have an AI idea? Let's prove it works on your data.

Tell us about your project and the data behind it. We'll book a free consultation, suggest the fastest way to a working prototype and send a free, fixed quote.

Email hello@dware.devFree quote · NDA on request