Senior Software Engineer (AI Infrastructure)

What you'll do

You build and maintain the production systems behind AI training, evaluation and deployment pipelines: backend services, APIs and data pipelines that have to stay reliable at scale.

The ad frames this as architectural work rather than ticket-driven work: you take well-scoped projects end to end, debug across distributed systems and cloud infrastructure, review other engineers' code, and help set engineering practice. Collaboration is asynchronous, with ML engineers, researchers and product managers. It is an hourly contract, fully remote, at 20–40 hours a week.

What you need

• Five or more years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in at least one of Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go or Java
• Experience building and deploying backend services, APIs or data-intensive applications
• Working knowledge of AWS, GCP or Azure, and of containerised environments
• Git, CI/CD workflows and modern development tooling
• Writing clear enough to document decisions and explain tradeoffs in an async-first team

Nice to have

• ML or AI infrastructure experience: training pipelines, model serving, annotation platforms, evaluation frameworks
• Large-scale data processing with Spark, Kafka, Airflow or similar
• Distributed systems, microservices, or event-driven design
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi) or Kubernetes
• Open-source contributions or a public portfolio
• Previous experience in a remote-first or async-heavy engineering culture

What it pays

$60–100/hour, stated on the listing. Against the stated 20–40 hours a week, that is roughly $1,200 a week at the bottom of the band on the fewest hours and about $4,000 at the top on the most, a spread wide enough that the number you agree at contract matters more than the ad does.

Worth knowing

Good:

• The rate is published up front, which most contract AI work is not
• Genuine engineering work, not annotation or model rating: you ship code
• 20–40 hours a week is loose enough to run alongside other contracts
• The ad states potential for extension and expanded scope as projects grow
• Fully remote and async, with no country restriction stated

Less good:

• The band is wide. $60 and $100 an hour are very different outcomes, and where you land is decided at contract rather than by the ad
• Hourly contract means no benefits, no notice period, and your own tax to manage
• Hours are billed as worked, and the 20–40 range describes the project's shape with no guaranteed floor
• "Potential for extension" is not a commitment; contract length here tracks project demand

About this listing

Posted by Alignerr on its own jobs board under the Coding category, confirmed open on 6 September 2026. The role is with Alignerr itself rather than with one of the AI labs it staffs. The $60–100/hour rate is the ad's own published figure. No closing date and no country restriction are stated, so both are left open. Onboarding and payment run at the platform level. See Alignerr.