Software Engineer Task Author

About OpenTrain

OpenTrain AI is the hiring and contracting organization for this role. OpenTrain is the #1 platform for finding and building careers in AI training and data labeling, helping contributors discover projects, build a professional profile, and grow in a fast-moving field. Creating an OpenTrain account is free.

About AI Training Work

AI training is the human side of building artificial intelligence. Contributors create examples, evaluate model behavior, and define what high-quality results look like so modern AI systems can become more capable, reliable, and useful.

In this role, your engineering judgment will shape how AI agents understand real-world software development, debugging, infrastructure, and code-fix tasks. The work is fully remote, flexible, and task-based.

The Role

OpenTrain AI is recruiting a Software Engineer Task Author to design and calibrate engineering challenges for AI training. You will create realistic task prompts, scoring rubrics, and task environments that push the capabilities of AI agents.

This is a part-time hourly contractor position for working software engineers across Canada. The commitment is flexible and task-based, with potential for ongoing work and contract extension.

• Location: Remote across Canada
• Employment type: Part-time contractor
• Time requirement: 20+ hours per week
• Pay: $70–$120 USD per hour, depending on experience
• Working language: English

What You'll Do

You will develop software engineering tasks that reflect the kinds of problems engineers encounter in production environments. Each task must be realistic, solvable, appropriately challenging, and supported by clear methods for verifying the outcome.

• Author engineering prompts covering integration failures, log-based debugging, bug traces, and configuration fixes
• Write scoring rubrics with exact correctness criteria and verification methods
• Set up task environments containing realistic codebases, logs, alerts, and system states
• Solve each task yourself to validate its soundness and accuracy
• Calibrate task difficulty to challenge the model appropriately
• Review and correct AI-drafted task prompts or rubrics when provided

Requirements

This role requires hands-on, industry-level software engineering experience and the ability to assess both technical solutions and the quality of an AI-generated response. You should be comfortable moving from a failure signal to root-cause analysis, implementing a fix, and defining objective standards for correctness.

• Working software engineer with hands-on, industry-level experience
• Fluency in Git, version control workflows, and code review practices
• Strong debugging skills, including reading logs, using observability tools, and tracing failures through a codebase
• Experience with infrastructure, integrations, and configuration code, including APIs, services, configuration files, and CI/CD
• Ability to write and verify a code fix in a live or simulated environment
• Ability to define precise, checkable correctness criteria for engineering outcomes

Helpful Background

The following experience is helpful but not required based on the role description.

• Experience in enterprise SaaS, e-commerce, telecommunications, or industrial engineering contexts
• Background with monitoring and observability platforms such as Datadog, PagerDuty, or Grafana
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures on AWS, GCP, or Azure

Why Work in AI Training

AI training and data labeling are among the fastest-growing ways to work in tech. People with software engineering expertise can contribute directly to the development of cutting-edge AI systems while working remotely and choosing flexible project-based opportunities.

• Work remotely from Canada
• Apply your engineering expertise to advanced AI development
• Choose flexible, task-based work that can fit around other commitments
• Help define how AI systems perform real software engineering tasks