Moonlabs Academy · how to hire your first AI engineer

How to hire your first AI engineer.

Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we train twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000. For employers: the graduates are who you want to hire.

Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. We hire AI engineers ourselves, sit on hiring panels for AI-native companies, and read CVs every working week. We know what the actual bar is in 2026 because we set it for our own roles.

The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. Every graduate ships a real AI product, signs a paid pilot, writes a deck and a financial model. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week. The graduates are exactly the shape most AI-native employers say they cannot find: people who can ship, sell, and reason about the unit economics of the system.

Why this page exists. The market for AI engineers is the most distorted technical hiring market in recent memory. Salaries vary by 3x for nominally identical roles. Most CVs claim Cursor, Claude Code, RAG and agents fluency; almost none have shipping evidence. Public job boards return a flood of candidates who pass the keyword screen and fail the technical one. Skip the CV. Ask for the deployed product. The Academy network is the most concentrated pool of people who can produce one on demand. Talk to us as an employer here.

Talk to us as an employer Apply to the Academy

Coding · what a real AI engineer ships in 2026

A live system in production. Cursor / Claude Code / Codex fluency. Eval suites the candidate wrote themselves. Retrieval and agentic patterns explained, not name-dropped. Observability that explains a bad day in real terms. Every Academy graduate produces exactly that artefact by demo day — the thing your interview should ask for.

Commercials · the market rate and the interview

AI-engineer salaries in 2026 sit in a wide range — £70k-£150k base for a strong UK hybrid hire, lower outside London, equity-heavy at founder-adjacent shape. The interview is “walk me through the eval suite”, not a leetcode round. The shape that wins: a 45-minute walkthrough of the deployed system, decisions defended, trade-offs explained. A filter that catches real ability and dodges the Cursor-wrote-this trap.

Investment · Academy grads on day one

Every Moonlabs Academy graduate arrives with a deployed AI product, an eval suite they wrote, and a paying customer reference. Hiring one is closer to acquiring a working AI product than to landing a junior engineer — an unusual ROI shape that compounds inside the first quarter. Warm introductions to graduates whose Academy project matches your stack. Sponsor a cohort seat or post your brief.

FAQ

Common questions.

What does a strong "AI engineer" CV actually look like in 2026?

A URL to a deployed system that uses AI as a core feature, with the candidate as the named engineer. Eval suites in a public repo (or shared on request). Evidence of having shipped something past hello-world. Everything else is noise.

Should I hire an AI engineer or a full-stack engineer who can do AI?

For most first AI hires at a non-AI-native company, the second. Full-stack engineers who have shipped AI features into existing products outperform pure-AI specialists at this stage; the AI specialism only earns its place when the AI is the product.

How do I interview without a leetcode round?

Walk through the candidate’s deployed product together for 45 minutes. Ask them to explain a decision they made and why. Ask them what they would change. Ask them how they evaluate it. This filter catches more real ability than a coding test, and you avoid the “was this written by Cursor in their hotel last night?” problem.

What about hiring through recruitment agencies?

For specialist AI hires in 2026, most general-tech recruiters under-perform. Specialist AI recruiters exist and have a place; expect to pay 25-30%. Worth knowing that recruiters themselves are being eaten by AI tooling.

Can I hire from Moonlabs Academy directly?

Yes — this is the most common employer route into the Academy network. Tell us the wedge, the stack and the seniority band; we will introduce graduates whose Academy project lines up. Talk to us as an employer.

For employers

The full Moonlabs employer page — hiring graduates, sending existing employees, partner programmes.

AI engineer portfolio bootcamp

For the candidate side of this question — the artefact every Academy graduate produces.

Other ways in

More Academy entry points.

The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.

How-to · the honest version

The candidate you wish came through the door.

Tell us about the AI hire you are trying to make. We will tell you honestly whether the Academy network is the right fit and make warm introductions where it is — James and Louis reply inside the week.

Talk to us as an employer See the Academy

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