Scale AI

How it works

Scale AI is a San Francisco data company, founded in 2016, that sells training data and AI applications to model builders, enterprises and governments. It does not run a general sign-up for annotation work under its own name. If you are looking for Scale AI jobs as a contractor, the work runs through two platforms Scale operates:

• Outlier, which describes itself as "a platform operated by Scale AI" and carries the expert work on large language models: writing hard prompts, building grading rubrics and ranking model answers. Writers, coders and subject specialists searching for Scale AI work almost always end up here.
• Remotasks, whose site says "Powered by Scale AI" and which advertises image labelling, audio transcription and data annotation to a large global pool of taskers.

Scale's own careers page does list contract roles directly, under its Human Frontier Collective, a community for PhDs, researchers and senior professionals that Scale introduced in November 2025. One current posting, a US-only STEM Fellow role, describes a fully remote independent contractor engagement of about six months at 10 to 40 hours a week, with no visa sponsorship. Salaried jobs at Scale itself are ordinary tech roles and are not what this site covers.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

In June 2025 Meta bought a 49 percent non-voting stake in Scale for about $14.3 billion, and co-founder Alexandr Wang left to work at Meta; TechCrunch and CNBC reported the deal. In July 2025 Scale cut about 14 percent of its staff, mostly in the data-labelling business, and ended work with about 500 contractors, according to TechCrunch and Bloomberg, which quoted the interim chief executive's memo saying Scale had ramped up its generative AI capacity "too quickly". Scale named Francis deSouza, previously of Google Cloud, as chief executive from 10 August 2026.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Scale's About page states it has paid $1B to contributors globally, so the platforms behind it are long-running and pay at scale
• Outlier states that you see a project's rate before you start it, which is not the norm in this market

Less good:

• A California class action, McKinney v. Scale AI, alleged that contributors were misclassified as independent contractors. Scale disputed the claims and agreed to a $12.5 million settlement; the San Francisco Superior Court granted preliminary approval, and the published settlement summary lists a final approval hearing on 30 October 2026. The class covers people who worked as contributors while living in California between December 2020 and February 2026
• The Washington Post reported in August 2023 that 34 of 36 Remotasks workers it interviewed in the Philippines had had payments delayed, reduced or cancelled
• Remotasks ended operations in Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan in March 2024, Rest of World reported, and some workers there said they received no notice
• Contributor reports about rate cuts and task droughts on Outlier are covered on the Outlier page

About this page

Facts above come from scale.com (the About page, the careers page and the July 2026 chief executive announcement), Outlier's FAQ and the Remotasks homepage, last checked 29 September 2026, plus the press and court sources named in each sentence. Scale publishes no contributor pay rates, payout schedule or country list of its own, because contributors are paid through Outlier and Remotasks, so the facts grid on this page is left empty. For which platforms take applicants with which backgrounds, see who can actually do this work.