Pristina (Prishtina) · CET / UTC+1
Hire an AI engineer
in Pristina.
I'm Ergini - an AI engineer based in Pristina, Kosovo. I ship OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, and open-source LLM integrations, production RAG systems, and AI agents. Senior-only. Direct contract, no agency layer.
Why Pristina, why now
Kosovo's engineering scene is small but growing fast. The fundamentals make it work for global AI clients: English-fluent, CET timezone (mornings overlap US East, afternoons cover Europe), and rates 30-50% under equivalent London or Berlin engineers without the agency markup.
What's rare even in Pristina is engineers who've actually shipped production AI - not LangChain demos, but systems with eval suites, cost monitoring, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and observability. I've shipped six and contributed to two more.
What I build
AI integrations
OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, open-source LLMs wired into your existing product - streaming chat, structured outputs, tool-calling.
RAG and vector search
Production RAG over your documents. Hybrid retrieval, reranking, citation grounding, eval. See the RAG architecture tutorial.
AI agents
Goal-directed agents with tool-calling and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
AI MVPs
End-to-end AI product builds - design through deployment. Typical timeline 6-10 weeks.
Frequently asked questions
Are you actually based in Pristina?
Yes - Pristina (Prishtina), Kosovo. I work remotely with clients worldwide but operate from CET.
What does an AI engineer in Pristina cost vs Western Europe?
Typically 30-50% less than equivalent senior engineers in London or Berlin, without the agency markup. Fixed-scope AI projects run $3.5K-$45K, AI MVPs $5K-$60K.
Do you cover the full AI stack?
Yes - frontend (Next.js, React), backend (Node.js, Python), model integration (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source via vLLM/Ollama), RAG (pgvector, Qdrant, Cohere rerank), agents, evals, observability, deployment.
Can you work US hours?
Partial overlap. Pristina is CET - I work mornings with US East Coast and afternoons covering Europe. For Pacific time, async-heavy collaboration works best.
How is hiring from Pristina different than hiring from a Western European agency?
Direct contract with the engineer doing the work. No project manager layer, no junior bench, no rebranded contractors. You talk to me, I write the code.