Freelance AI Engineer in Jakarta, Indonesia
I build AI workers: systems that answer the phone, handle customer chat and run repetitive operations without a person in the loop. Based in Jakarta, working with teams across Southeast Asia and remotely with clients in other time zones.
Scoped work starts around IDR 1,500,000. Larger systems are quoted individually.
What an AI worker actually replaces
The phrase covers a lot of marketing, so here is the concrete version. An AI worker is a service that owns one repetitive job end to end — answering first-line support calls, replying to marketplace chat, confirming orders, qualifying inbound leads — and escalates to a human when it is not confident.
The engineering that matters is unglamorous: latency budgets, retrieval over your real data, function calls into your existing systems, and honest handover when the model is unsure. Everything I ship runs on your infrastructure, not on a platform that holds your data hostage.
What I build
- Voice agents for inbound and outbound calling — sub-second latency, Twilio and WebRTC
- Chatbots grounded in your documents and connected to your APIs
- E-commerce and back-office automation, including custom Chrome extensions
- Speech-to-text and text-to-speech orchestration for real-time transcription
- High-concurrency backends in Go when throughput is the constraint
- Full-stack web applications and internal tools in React, Next.js and Node.js
Why hire a freelance AI engineer instead of an agency
Freelance specialists onboard faster than full-time hires and cost a fraction of a senior in-house AI engineer, who commands well past USD 140,000 a year in major markets. For a scoped deliverable — one voice agent, one automation suite, one proof of concept — that difference is the entire project budget.
You also work with the person writing the code rather than through an account manager. Every technical question gets answered by someone who can change the system while answering.
How I work
- Free consultationWe scope the problem, the integrations and the realistic latency and cost budget before any money changes hands.
- Proof of concept firstOne working flow you can actually use, delivered early. It removes the biggest risk on both sides.
- Milestone deliveryTransparent progress reports with a staging environment you can try at every milestone.
- HandoverSource code, documentation and deployment config, running on your own servers.
Selected work
HERA Voice
Low-latency agentic voice platform with bidirectional audio streaming and real-time intent recognition.
HERA Vid
AI video generation and orchestration platform built in TypeScript and React.
Shopee Automation Suite
Production Chrome extension handling AI chat replies, listing management, price scraping and stock sync.
Go Multi-Worker Concurrency
Parallel task pool scheduler with strict concurrency limits and error propagation.
Frequently asked questions
Do you work with clients outside Indonesia?
Yes. I work remotely with clients in other time zones and overlap a few hours daily for calls. Jakarta is GMT+7, which gives comfortable overlap with Singapore, Australia, India and most of Europe.
What is your rate?
Projects are quoted rather than billed hourly, so the price is fixed against a defined deliverable. Small scoped work starts around IDR 1,500,000; voice agent and automation systems are quoted after the scoping call.
Which models and providers do you use?
OpenAI, Claude, and open models accessed through OpenRouter, chosen per workload rather than by habit. I put a thin abstraction in front of the provider so you can switch when pricing changes, which it does every few months.
Can you take over an existing AI project?
Yes. I start with an audit of the current code and infrastructure and give you a written list of findings and a repair order before changing anything.
Who owns the code?
You do. Source code, documentation and deployment configuration are handed over in full, and everything runs on infrastructure you control.
Free consultation, no commitment
Tell me what you need over WhatsApp or email. You get a scoped estimate back, not a template quote.
+62 851-5501-4889 · christian.budiono11@gmail.com · Jakarta Pusat, Indonesia