Senior Software Engineer - Testing AI Coding Agents

Role Description

Mindrift connects specialists with project-based AI opportunities for leading tech companies, focused on testing, evaluating, and improving AI systems. Participation is project-based.

What this opportunity involves:

• Building a dataset to evaluate AI coding agents - how well a model handles real-world developer tasks.
• Creating challenging tasks and evaluation criteria within realistic simulated environments:
• Build realistic developer environments - a virtual company with codebase, infrastructure, and context (tickets, docs, conversations) that forms a believable development history.
• Design tasks from intermediate states of these environments - craft the prompt, define what "solved" means, and ensure the task is solvable by an AI agent.
• Write tests that verify agent solutions - accept all valid approaches and reject incorrect ones, neither too strict nor too lenient.
• Iterate on tasks and tests based on QA feedback - review agent solutions, analyze failures, and refine until the evaluation is fair and robust.

What this is NOT:

• Not data labeling.
• Not prompt engineering.
• Not writing code from scratch - the agent writes most of the code; you guide and evaluate.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in software development.
• Core stack: Python (FastAPI), JavaScript/TypeScript (React), Docker, Postgres, Kafka, Redis.
• Experience writing tests (functional, integration).
• English proficiency - B2+.

Requirements

• Deep understanding of where models fail and what scenarios reveal the difference between a good and a bad solution.
• Ability to create tasks that genuinely challenge the best models.
• Writing tests that accept all correct solutions and reject incorrect ones.

Benefits

• Compensation up to $50/hr equivalent, depending on level and pace.
• Tasks are estimated at ~20 hours each; you set your own schedule.

Effort Estimate

Tasks for this project are estimated to take 20 hours to complete, depending on complexity. This is an estimate and not a schedule requirement; you choose when and how to work. Tasks must be submitted by the deadline and meet the listed acceptance criteria to be accepted.