Freelance Agent Evaluation Engineer

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, not permanent employment.

We're building a dataset to evaluate AI coding agents - how well a model handles real-world developer tasks. You'll create 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.

Why this is hard:

• Frontier models are already good at coding. Creating a task that genuinely challenges the best models is non-trivial.
• You need to deeply understand where models fail and what scenarios reveal the difference between a good and a bad solution.
• Tasks have many valid solutions - writing tests that accept all correct solutions and reject incorrect ones is harder than it sounds.

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

• A Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science / Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics / Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Systems or other related fields.
• Bachelor’s degree is accepted if the candidate has 5 years of experience in the field.
• Minimum of 3 years of professional experience in related roles or domain - specifically for QA-automation/testing or cybersecurity roles.

Benefits

• Paid per accepted task. Your rate depends on the qualification tier you reach and how efficiently you complete tasks — up to the equivalent of $30/hr.
• Because payment is per task, a faster pace raises your effective hourly rate.
• Take part in a part-time, remote, freelance project that fits around your primary professional or academic commitments.
• Work on advanced AI projects and gain valuable experience that enhances your portfolio.
• Influence how future AI models understand and communicate in your field of expertise.