Senior AR/VR development talent and rates in Dublin
Senior AR/VR development engineers in Dublin run roughly $98–$147/hr. 15K–35K senior iOS/Android engineers; React Native and Flutter strong. 5–8 week senior hiring loop; visa quota tight. Operating timezone: GMT/IST (UTC+0/+1).
What AR/VR development actually requires in 2026
2026 stack: Unity 6 (still dominant), Unreal 5 (graphics-intensive), Apple Vision Pro toolkit (visionOS), Meta Quest SDK + Spark AR for Meta devices. WebXR for browser-based AR. 8th Wall for marker-less web AR. Roblox Studio for spatial-social. Senior XR engineers come from games, simulation, or specialized training-software backgrounds. Pure web/mobile devs without game-engine fluency can't build production XR — Unity/Unreal mental model is fundamentally different from web component trees.
Where Dublin senior AR/VR development talent comes from
Where Dublin senior AR/VR development talent comes from: Dublin senior talent is dominated by US tech giants' EMEA HQs — Stripe Dublin, Meta Dublin, Google Dublin, LinkedIn Dublin, Microsoft Ireland, Workday Ireland. Most senior talent is contracted into these. Independent boutique market is smaller than London / Berlin / Amsterdam. For AR/VR development specifically, this means buyers can typically tap engineers who have shipped at one of these orgs before — relevant operational depth, not bootcamp graduates.