Jatin Singh

Let's be honest. Most employers still believe that sponsoring an H-1B visa is just about paying a few government filing fees. A couple thousand here, some attorney time there, and you're done. That might have been close to the truth

The H-1B visa used to be the default playbook for hiring international talent. File the petition, pay the fees, wait for the lottery, and eventually get your person into a U.S. office. It was slow and expensive, but it worked. In 2026, that

Every quarter, somebody in a US leadership meeting says "we need an AI team." And then the hiring starts, usually in the wrong order. A company brings on three data scientists before anyone has even thought about where the training data lives.

Hiring AI engineers in the US right now is brutal. A mid-level machine learning engineer costs you north of $170,000 in total compensation, and that number keeps climbing. Recruiters are quoting four to six month timelines to fill a single ML role. And

A mid-level machine learning engineer in the US earns a median total compensation of $260,780 according to Levels.fyi. The same role in India pays roughly ₹24.6 lakh, which works out to about $29,000, though in practice it skews higher in