Software Engineering Expert

Pay: $70 – $150/hour
Commitment: Part time, ~40 h/week
Field: Software Engineering

The research teams behind the best-known AI models come to Mercor for software engineering judgment they can't generate on their own. Your standards and expertise become the rubric that frontier AI is graded against.

This is a standing listing for engineers who want AI training and evaluation work, not a specific job opening. It stays open whether or not a matching project is running this week.

New projects start on short notice, so instead of posting and pulling a listing each time, we keep one open per field and draw from it when one begins.

What the work looks like

We match engineers in the network to projects like:

• Writing an engineering problem from a system you have shipped, with the requirements, the constraints, and the failure modes, plus the reference answer a model's attempt gets graded against
• Grading model-written code and design: whether it handles the edge cases, whether the complexity is justified, whether the test actually exercises the behaviour it claims to
• Flagging where a model's code passes review and would fail in production, given concurrency, scale, error handling, or what it costs to operate

Software engineering listings on Mercor have posted at $70 to $150 an hour, set per project by scope and depth.

What we're looking for

• Professional experience building and shipping software
• Clear written communication, since most of the work involves explaining your reasoning
• Comfort with ambiguous tasks, and willingness to flag unclear instructions

What this covers

This pool spans software engineering, including:

• Frontend (React, TypeScript, Next.js); backend (Java, Go, Node.js); full-stack
• Mobile (Android, iOS); embedded and IoT
• DevOps and platform engineering; systems and performance engineering
• QA and automation; security engineering

Where you trained matters less than whether you have owned code in production and dealt with what it did there.

How it works

Apply here with your resume and confirm where you work from, then take a short AI interview, about 20 minutes total.

We verify your background and add you to the software engineering pool.

When a project needs your stack or specialty, we invite matching people from the pool to that specific listing. It names the rate, the hours, and the client, and any hiring decision is made there.

What to expect

This listing does not accept or reject candidates, so you will not get a decision on it. We reach out when a project matches your background. Depending on what our clients are running, that can be within a week or several months.

Finishing the domain expert interview and joining every network you qualify for both improve your odds of being matched. You only need to sign up once to be eligible across all of them.