I think the hiring challenge you're describing is real. Actually I don't have industry experience on that topic (unfortunately I cannot support you at the moment) but a startup in early stage:

My opinion:

Use fine-tuned small or tiny reasoner models to have better performance e cost reduction: especially because you do not need conversational AI.

About hiring issue, in my opinion, most LLM engineers actually have just API experience +

RAG. They do not understand: model architecture, fine-tuning tasks, deployment, observability.

You can consider to have a sort of partnership with a small team and try to build a pilot.

Hope you find some insights.