The Role As a Strategic Projects Lead (SPL), you will own the end-to-end delivery of coding data pipelines used to train frontier AI models.
Backend Engineer
Australia, Canada, Ireland +3
$40 – $150/hr
September 22, 2026
Job description
Overview
Models write backend code that passes the happy-path test and falls over on everything else: the race condition under load, the N+1 that melts the database, the API contract that breaks every client the day you change it. Someone has to reason about the system, not just the snippet, and that someone is you.
As a Backend Engineer you'll stress-test how models design services, data models, and APIs, expose where their reasoning breaks under real load, and write the answers a strong backend engineer would stand behind.
What you’ll actually do
- Probe backend reasoning across service design, data modeling, and API contracts, and see where the model's design falls apart.
- Find the failures that matter: race conditions, N+1 queries, bad indexes, and breaking changes hiding in a clean-looking diff.
- Write the correct design when the model falls short, with the scaling and consistency trade-offs made explicit.
Roles this fits
Common backgrounds: Backend Engineer, API Engineer, Platform Engineer.
What we look for
- Professional or serious open-source experience building backend services.
- Comfort with databases, APIs, and concurrency; most tasks assume a language like Python, Go, Java, or Rust.
- Clear written English: your explanations are the training signal.
- No degree required. We care about what you can do, not where you learned it.
How it works
Apply
Qualify
Work & get paid
Compensation
Up to $40 – $150+/hr depending on task difficulty and specialization. Many contributors add $10k–$100k+ a year; some make it their full-time income.
About DataAnnotation
DataAnnotation is where 100k+ experts train the world’s leading AI models. $150M+ paid to contributors to date, and the average contributor stays 5+ years. Flexible, remote, and always project-available.
Available regions
Each region below is open to applicants in that country only. Apply through the link for your region.
Apply now
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## About the Project We build hard, verifiable command-line tasks used to evaluate frontier AI agents. AI agents are good at the textbook. They still fail where experience matters: a default nobody questions, a rule nobody wrote down, a fix that looks right and isn't.
Opportunity Snapshot Pay: $50–100/hour Time per task: ~15 hours per run Onboarding: As soon as you’re selected, Talent Ops will send you everything you need to get started You’ll need: clear open source contributions and a profile to showcase them, such as GitHub (preferably…
Opportunity Snapshot Pay: $50–100/hour Time per task: ~15 hours per run Onboarding: As soon as you’re selected, Talent Ops will send you everything you need to get started You’ll need: clear open source contributions and a profile to showcase them, such as GitHub (preferably…