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Senior Machine Learning Engineer

$60-80/hrRemoteFreelanceCODING

About the Role

What if your deepest ML expertise — the kind built from years of debugging models, engineering features, and decomposing hard problems — could directly shape how the next generation of AI systems reason and make decisions?

We're looking for Senior Machine Learning Engineers to author high-fidelity reasoning traces for large language models. This means writing structured, step-by-step records of how an intelligent system should plan, use tools, and arrive at decisions when tackling complex, real-world technical tasks. The data you create trains LLMs to reason more reliably — and your senior-level insight is exactly what makes the difference between traces that are merely adequate and traces that are exceptional.

This is a fully remote, flexible contract role built for experienced ML practitioners who want to work at the frontier of AI development on their own terms.

  • Organization: Alignerr
  • Type: Hourly Contract
  • Location: Remote
  • Commitment: 10–40 hours/week

What You'll Do

  • Author complex, high-fidelity reasoning traces that capture how an LLM should plan, reason, and act when solving sophisticated technical tasks
  • Break down intricate problems into clear, logical, and well-documented decision sequences
  • Document tool use, planning strategies, and multi-step reasoning in structured formats
  • Review and provide expert feedback on traces created by other contributors
  • Design data strategies that help models navigate ambiguous, multi-step, real-world scenarios
  • Apply your understanding of LLM evaluation and training to ensure traces drive meaningful model improvement

Who You Are

  • Experienced ML practitioner with deep knowledge of model reasoning, training pipelines, or LLM behavior
  • Skilled at decomposing hard problems into structured, logical steps — and explaining your thinking clearly
  • Familiar with LLM evaluation methodologies and what makes a model's decision process trustworthy
  • Detail-oriented and rigorous — you set a high bar for quality and consistency
  • Comfortable working independently in an asynchronous, remote environment

Nice to Have

  • Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or AI evaluation systems
  • Top-tier Kaggle competition results (Grandmaster or Master level) demonstrating advanced model performance and feature engineering expertise
  • Background in AI safety, alignment research, or RLHF-adjacent work
  • Experience mentoring or reviewing technical work produced by other ML practitioners

Why Join Us

  • Work directly with world-leading AI research teams and labs on genuinely frontier projects
  • Fully remote and asynchronous — work when and where you're most effective
  • Freelance autonomy with meaningful, intellectually stimulating task-based work
  • Gain rare, hands-on exposure to how cutting-edge LLMs are trained and evaluated
  • Contribute to AI systems that millions of people will rely on
  • Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch