Kubernetes Task Auditor

What you'll do

If you have been paged for a CrashLoopBackOff at 3am, you already know the material. A frontier AI lab is training and testing its models on Kubernetes operations tasks, and you check that those tasks are correct and production-realistic.

What you review:

• Cluster-operations scenarios: do they reflect how real clusters behave, across CNI, DNS, ingress, persistent volumes and RBAC?
• Manifests and Helm charts: are the reference answers correct, secure and production-ready?
• Troubleshooting tasks: is the diagnosis path for failures like CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, scheduling problems and evictions accurate, and is the expected fix actually the fix?

Each review ends in rubric-based written feedback. A common trap in this kind of task is a scenario with two plausible root causes where only one is accepted; spotting that ambiguity is part of the job.

Who fits

Basic qualifications:

• 3+ years of hands-on production Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS or self-managed)
• Deep cluster internals: CNI, DNS, ingress, PV/PVC storage, RBAC, and the common failure modes
• Experience writing and reviewing manifests and Helm charts, and debugging live incidents
• Proficiency in Go, Python or TypeScript

Preferred: CKA or CKAD certification; service mesh, autoscaling and observability (Istio, HPA, Prometheus and Grafana); and prior SRE, platform engineering or task-grading experience.

Note that managed-cluster users qualify; you do not need to have run your own control plane.

What it pays

$70–90 per hour, weekly via Stripe or Wise. H-1B and STEM OPT candidates cannot be supported. Hours and duration are not published.

Platform engineers who are also deep in AWS should compare the AWS Serverless & Infrastructure-as-Code Task Auditor, posted at the same rate.

Worth knowing

Good:

• SRE and platform engineers rarely see AI-training listings aimed squarely at them
• Certification helps but is not required
• Asynchronous, remote

Less good:

• US-only, with the visa exclusion
• A coding language is required, not just YAML fluency
• No hours or duration published
• Independent contractor; projects can be extended, shortened or ended early

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as a remote hourly contract for US residents, confirmed open on 24 September 2026. Qualifications and pay are the ad's own. See Mercor.