Comment by tbird24

As someone who's done freelancing previously for years and also has run an agency previously for years, it really depends. I've certainly seen freelancers at double or triple these rates. If you already have clients, are well known, or you're good at selling the value of your time, you can ask for much higher. If you're just getting started or you're going through an agency, these rates seem pretty competitive. Also macro economic factors will change the equation and what you can ask for.

For those just getting started, my piece of advice is to be OK taking a lower rate initially, and just keep pushing it higher until you find resistance. If you're good at what you do, you will quickly find that you will get referrals (make sure to ask!) and can charge a ton more. It's a lot easier as a freelancer/contractor than a salaried employee since the market is much more liquid (you spend less time at one gig) and therefore you can test the waters with a higher rate much more often.

Regardless, what these companies list as what they will pay hourly isn't necessarily what you have to ask for. If you think about it from a negotiation perspective (and you have the ability to sell yourself), these are simply just the lower bound of what you can ask for.

That was my thought too. General rule of thumb for independent contracting is that you should take the annual salary you would normally make and chop off the zeroes to get the hourly rate. So 150K/yr becomes $150/hr. That’s about double the yearly salary and pays for your increased costs (payroll tax, healthcare, retirement, vacation) as well as your bench time between jobs.

Additionally, the going rate for an interim CTO was about $50K/month last time I checked, which doesn’t get you 40 hrs / week, so is north of $600/hr.

My rule of thumb as a contractor is to take the hourly rate x2100 to get an equivalent full-time salary plus benefits, 401k, vacation, etc.

Fractional CTO | $368k - $420k

Senior AI Engineer | €179k - €210k

Senior Full-stack Engineer | $263k - $315k

Staff Frontend Engineer | $252k - $378k

AI Engineer | $210k - $263k

Given that the rates are decent. Not the best out there but decent. I'd consider this before Upwork where contract rates are criminally low.

The roles seem very high too. I think "part time engineer" and figured these would be small gigs, or temp roles for specific tasks.

Not "CTO". Is anyone is a role of lead or higher (or AI engineers in general) having that bad a time finding work?

For publicly-posted jobs, they are about right.

The higher rates come through trusted referrals. If you arrive at a company via referral from someone they trust, they will usually pay a lot more than hiring random people who apply.

*For the North American perspective