HelmUnit places a senior AI & automation engineer inside your business — documenting how the work really happens, automating it, and measuring that it holds up in production. You buy a fraction of that person rather than all of one, priced and invoiced in Swiss francs, and you can stop at the end of any month. Swiss clients can be hosted in Switzerland, so data covered by the FADP never has to leave the country.
Switzerland pays the highest engineering salaries in Europe, and the social charges are among the lightest. Those two facts point in opposite directions, so the arithmetic is worth doing properly rather than assuming either one wins.
| What you pay for | Year one | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | CHF 150,000 | A senior machine learning or AI engineer in Zurich with 8+ years’ experience. The top quartile runs well above CHF 190,000. |
| Social charges (AHV/IV/EO, ALV, BVG, UVG) | + CHF 24,000 | Around 16% all-in. AHV/IV/EO is 5.3% employer, and BVG pension rises with the employee’s age. |
| Recruiter fee | + CHF 30,000 | 20% of first-year salary, standard contingency for a specialist permanent role. |
| Before they have shipped anything | CHF 204,000 | And 4–9 months to recruit, then 1–3 more to ramp. |
CHF 204,000 is the conservative reading. Take the salary to the Zurich upper quartile and the first year passes CHF 260,000. The social charges are genuinely modest by European standards at around 16% — but they apply to the largest salaries on the continent, and BVG rises as the employee gets older, so the senior engineer you actually want is the one who costs most to carry.
The scarcity is worse here than the money. Swiss employers are competing with Google Zurich, ETH spin-outs and the banks for people who can do commercial and technical judgement in one head. A mid-sized manufacturer in Aargau is not going to win that fight, and a year spent losing it is a year in which nothing was automated.
A quarter of our engineer is CHF 3,800 a month, starts next week, and ends whenever you say so. You own the code, the data and the documentation from day one, so a month that turns out to be the wrong month costs you a month.
Sources: salary from ERI SalaryExpert (senior machine learning engineer, Switzerland, 8+ years: CHF 146,971) and Glassdoor Zurich AI-engineer data, June 2026 (25th–75th percentile CHF 120,500–192,375); social charge rates from Findea, AX-Fiduciaire and Swiss employer payroll guidance for 2026 — AHV/IV/EO 10.6% split equally, with ALV, BVG and UVG taking the employer total to roughly 12–20% depending on age, canton and pension plan; recruiter fee at the 20% contingency benchmark.
Quoted and invoiced in Swiss francs. Introductory rates for our first cohort — whatever rate you start on is the rate you keep.
Analysis at the start, steady improvement at the end. For smaller firms, often enough for the whole journey.
Steady building. The typical pace for a small firm's backlog — or continuous improvement at a mid-sized one.
A full engineer. For mid-sized firms clearing a real backlog — scale down when it's done, or add a second engineer if the backlog justifies it.
Finished building for now? Everything we built stays monitored, patched, and improved in small steps — without paying for capacity you no longer need.
Commit to twelve months and take 10% off any tier. Month-to-month stays month-to-month — cancel anytime, as always.
Listed rates are for remote delivery. We do come on-site in Switzerland — and prefer to, especially while we are mapping how your work really happens — but that is a fraction of an engagement, not the shape of it. On-site days are quoted separately, by destination and duration.
All prices exclude VAT. HelmUnit invoices from AzureVibes, s.r.o. in the Czech Republic, so a business customer in Switzerland receives an invoice carrying no Czech VAT and accounts for the tax locally. Your finance team will recognise the treatment.
20 August 2026. These are real invoiceable prices, not a conversion of the euro rate — we quote and invoice in this currency and carry the exchange-rate risk ourselves. They are rounded well clear of spot so ordinary currency movement never changes what you were quoted.
Swiss hosting is available and is the usual choice here — we build inside environments you control, so data covered by the revised FADP can stay in Switzerland throughout. The default elsewhere is the EU. You own the environment, the credentials and the data from day one, and your documents are never used to train anyone’s models. Where a Swiss company also falls under the EU AI Act because it sells into the EU, we keep those transparency and documentation obligations in order too.
Prefer the euro price, or based outside Switzerland? The standard EUR pricing applies everywhere else in Europe. If you want the method rather than the price, start with what a forward deployed engineer is.
HelmUnit starts at CHF 3,800 per month for a quarter of a senior AI and automation engineer — roughly five days of capacity a month. A half engineer is CHF 7,100 and a full engineer CHF 13,300 per month. Once the building is done and the work is mostly monitoring, the engagement scales down to CHF 1,900 a month. Every tier is month-to-month and cancellable, and prices are quoted and invoiced in francs rather than converted from euros at billing time.
In year one, substantially — an in-house senior AI engineer in Zurich costs around CHF 204,000 once AHV, BVG, unemployment and accident cover and a recruiter fee are added to a CHF 150,000 salary, and 4–9 months of that year is spent recruiting. Take the salary to the Zurich upper quartile and the first year passes CHF 260,000. From year two a full-time hire doing genuinely full-time work is cheaper than our full-engineer tier. Most companies of 150 to 1,500 people do not have a full engineer’s worth of AI work every week.
Yes. The price on this page is the price on the invoice — we quote in CHF, invoice in CHF, and carry the exchange-rate risk ourselves rather than passing a conversion on to you. HelmUnit invoices from AzureVibes, s.r.o. in the Czech Republic, so as a Swiss business you receive an invoice with no Czech VAT and account for the tax locally.
Yes, and for Swiss clients that is normally what we do. We deploy into infrastructure you control, so systems and data covered by the revised FADP can sit in Switzerland throughout rather than in the EU. You own the environment, the credentials and the data from day one, and nothing is used to train anyone’s models.
Mostly, yes — listed rates cover remote delivery, and the building, testing and monitoring are all done just as well remotely. We do travel to Switzerland, and prefer to while we are still mapping how the work really happens, because that is the phase that rewards being in the room. On-site days are quoted separately by duration.
No — we work in English, and that is a limit worth stating rather than discovering. The engineer will read your German- or French-language documents, forms and emails, and the systems we build process them; what we do not do is deliver the engagement or write the documentation in those languages. In practice this suits Swiss companies whose management already works in English and is the wrong fit for one whose team does not.
That is rather the point. Ours is CHF 3,800 a month, starts next week, and ends whenever you say so — against a Zurich hire you spend most of a year trying to win. Tell us the process that costs your team the most.
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