Hire AI-native operators.
Tired of paying recruiters £15,000 to deliver a graduate who has never shipped a prompt? Every Moonlabs Academy graduate has spent twelve weeks shipping production AI to real customers. Hire from the cohort with no placement fee — or sponsor a seat and send your own engineer for £6,000.
If your team is building AI features in 2026 and you are tired of hiring computer science graduates who have never shipped a prompt, this page is for you. The Moonlabs Academy is a twelve-week in-person cohort in Derby that produces a graduate profile we have not seen elsewhere in the UK market.
By demo day, every graduate has shipped a real product, charged real money, written real evals, and pitched real investors. The skills compound. Hiring one of them is not the same transaction as hiring a fresh graduate.
What you actually get.
Production AI engineering
Cursor, Claude Code, evals as a discipline, prompt versioning, RAG with Postgres + pgvector, agentic workflows. Not a Coursera certificate — twelve weeks of doing it.
Commercial fluency
They can write a contract, scope a pilot, price a service, and run a discovery call without supervision. The thing graduate engineers usually cannot do for two years.
Investor literacy
They have read a SAFE, sat across from a real investor, and built a financial model that an angel signed off on. When you tell them about the company runway, they will understand it.
A shipped product
Every graduate has a live product on the internet with a real customer using it. That is their portfolio piece. You can use it for free.
Founder posture
Because they built a company for twelve weeks, they bring ownership instincts. They ask "what does the customer want" before "what does my ticket say."
Derby-priced
Salary expectations are calibrated to a Midlands cohort — £55k-£75k for the strongest, lower for the rest. London tier outcomes at non-London bands.
How the hire happens.
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01
Tell us the role
A short brief — what your team builds, the role title, salary band, location/remote, must-haves. Email founders@homemove.com. We answer the same week.
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02
Demo day, 3 Sep 2026
You are invited to Derby for the day. Twelve graduates present their companies. You shortlist three to four for follow-up. Lunch is included.
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03
Direct interviews
We make warm introductions to the candidates you want. The graduate runs their own process from there. We do not take a placement fee.
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04
Trial week (optional)
We strongly recommend a paid trial week before offer. Most of our placements have done one. It de-risks the hire on both sides.
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05
Offer + start
Graduates are available from September 2026 onward. Most have started by mid-October.
Send a student. Or send your employee.
Two ways for a company to put someone through the Academy. Both cost £6,000. Both produce an operator your team can deploy on real AI work the week after graduation.
Sponsor an external student.
You pay tuition for a student you have not met yet. We allocate one of our cohort seats to your sponsorship and, at demo day, you get right of first refusal on hiring them. If they accept, the £6,000 you paid is credited in full against their first-year salary; if they decline or it is not a fit, the sponsorship rolls into next cohort.
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Tuition: £6,000 per seat -
Up to two seats sponsorable per cohort -
Right of first refusal at demo day -
£6,000 credited against first-year salary on hire
Send an existing employee.
You have a strong engineer or operator on the team and you want them AI-native by September. Pay £6,000 tuition, they take twelve weeks in Derby, and they return to your team having shipped a production AI product end-to-end. We build their cohort project to map onto your actual roadmap where we can.
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Tuition: £6,000 per employee -
Twelve weeks full-time in Derby -
Cohort project shaped towards your roadmap (within reason) -
IP of the project belongs to the employee unless we agree otherwise in writing
The economics
We do not take a placement fee.
Standard recruiter fees in the UK for an AI engineering hire are 20-25% of first-year salary. On a £65k hire, that is £13,000-£16,250. We do not charge any of it.
The Academy is funded by tuition. Our incentive is graduate outcomes, not extracting margin from hires. If you bring a role and we have a fit, we connect you — that is the relationship.
Roles we typically place into.
AI engineer / founding engineer at a Series A startup
The most common landing. Companies under fifty heads, building an AI-flavoured product, that need a generalist who can ship.
Forward-deployed engineer at an AI vendor
Companies selling AI infra or platforms to enterprise customers. The commercial fluency matters; the engineering still has to land.
Solo AI hire inside a mid-market company
A non-tech-native business that is starting its AI build. The graduate often ends up as the first AI hire and remains the only one for a year.
Technical co-founder for an unfunded founder
Less frequent but it happens. Usually after the graduate has built up six to twelve months of operator credit.
Common questions.
Are the graduates UK-based?
All graduates are in the UK during the cohort and most stay UK-based after. A small number are open to relocation. We will tell you which on a per-candidate basis.
Can you do this for a specific role brief?
Yes. Send the brief now and we will shortlist for you ahead of demo day. The earlier you brief us, the better the calibration.
What if I cannot make it to Derby on demo day?
We record the pitches and host follow-up calls. In-person is better — Derby is 90 minutes from London by train — but it is not a hard requirement.
Do you place experienced engineers too?
No, the Academy graduates one cohort at a time. If you are looking for senior AI engineering hires we may be able to refer to operators in our network, but that is informal not contractual.
What about full-time or part-time arrangements?
Most placements are full-time. Some graduates have done four-day weeks to keep their own company running in parallel. We can flag this in introductions.
Can I sponsor a seat for a student or an employee?
Yes — two flavours. Route one: sponsor an external student at £6,000 tuition, get right of first refusal at demo day, and the £6,000 is credited against their first-year salary if you hire them. Route two: send an existing employee, £6,000 tuition, twelve weeks in Derby, their cohort project shaped towards your roadmap. See the "Sponsor a seat" section above for the full mechanic.
Demo day · 3 September 2026 · Derby
Request an invitation.
Email founders@homemove.com with the role you are hiring for, the salary band, and your headcount. We will send a calendar invitation and a candidate shortlist the week before.
Read the thinking.
All essaysYour next chapter starts here.
Tell us about the company you want to build. If we’re a fit, we’ll get back within a week.
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