Machine Learning Engineer | Remote

Work Snapshot Type: Hourly Contract Commitment: Minimum 20 hours per week; greater availability strongly preferred Pay: $75 $90/hour What You'll Be Doing • Attempt open-ended machine learning research tasks within a fixed time and compute budget in a sandboxed Linux environment, working independently with preferred tools and workflows • Record full working sessions via screen recording and submit final work products alongside pre- and post-task questionnaires • Serve as a human reference point, with your performance benchmarked against frontier-model agents on realistic ML R&D problems • Utilize preferred tooling including IDEs and coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude Code, and ChatGPT within the provided environment • Work across focus areas such as pretraining, post-training alignment, reinforcement learning, dataset curation, or architecture design What We're Looking For • Strong experience in machine learning research or engineering, with a minimum of three or more years of hands-on practical work (PhD program time counts; undergraduate and master's experience does not) • Strong experience in at least one major ML framework PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow • Strong experience in at least one of the following domains: pretraining transformer LLMs from scratch, reinforcement learning with custom environments, post-training fine-tuning and alignment (LoRA, DPO, RLHF, RLAIF), large-scale dataset curation, or neural network architecture design • Strong experience working in academic or industry environments at a top-100 university or FAANG-equivalent organization • Strong experience operating independently in technical research settings; prior work as an ML evaluator, red-teamer, or baseliner is a plus • Ability to work under NDA; all work is confidential and compute is fully provided no personal GPU required How To Apply • Submit resume for review • Complete a work trial task under standard time and compute constraints • Successful completion leads to an ongoing engagement