Software Engineer, Go: Codebase Q&A

What you'll do

Codebase Q&A is a reinforcement-learning environment that teaches AI agents to investigate repositories they have never seen. This track is the Go one, and it runs on infrastructure-grade projects: etcd, Traefik, Helm, Kustomize, CoreDNS, NATS Server, Temporal, Syncthing, restic, Authelia, BadgerDB, quic-go, gRPC-Go, Hugo, rclone, Trivy, cert-manager and Pion WebRTC.

You do not write tasks from a blank page. Each one arrives pinned to a git commit with a starting question, positive and negative rubrics, foils (plausible wrong answers) and a golden solution. Your job is to make it hard and fair:

1. Explore the repository until you really understand the subsystem, including the relevant PR and issue history
2. Rewrite the question so frontier coding agents fail it but it stays well-defined and answerable
3. Adjust rubrics and foils so they reward correct reasoning and reject convincing wrong answers
4. Run the validation loop in Mercor Studio (Check, Golden, Run, Analyze) until every stage passes
5. Document the task in its README and submit; address reviewer feedback on anything returned

The questions are the kind that cannot be answered from one file and need runtime evidence. The ad gives the task mix: architecture and system design 42%, code onboarding 26%, root-cause analysis 20%.

Who fits

• 3+ years of professional software engineering, with substantial production Go
• Proven ability to navigate a large unfamiliar Go codebase and explain its runtime behaviour, not just its source
• Fluency in Go concurrency, interfaces, module boundaries and the standard library; comfort with generated code and build tooling
• Distributed systems, networking, storage engines or Kubernetes-ecosystem experience is highly relevant
• Precise written English, since the questions and rubrics are the product
• Comfort with git at commit level, containers and the command line

How it works

Work happens in Mercor Studio. Time is tracked with Insightful and platform access runs through Okta. Onboarding includes identity verification, a background check, signed Terms of Work and a CIIAA (an IP assignment agreement), a tax form, and a short calibration quiz before you get task access. Team leads sit across US, India and Nigeria time zones.

Note the time tracking: even though pay is per task, activity is monitored, so be comfortable with that before you onboard.

What it pays

$130 per approved task. Every task is reviewed by a second engineer and then a super reviewer before it counts, so rejected or returned work is not paid until it passes. The ad does not estimate hours per task, which is what determines your effective hourly rate; a deep investigation into etcd internals could take far longer than a Hugo question.

Payment method, payment schedule and any visa restrictions are not published on this listing.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Interesting work on well-known Go infrastructure projects
• Very active: 336 hires on the listing this month when we checked
• No country restriction is published; leads span several time zones
• Starting material (rubrics, foils, golden solution) is provided

Less good:

• Paid only on approval after two review layers
• Hours per task are unknown, so the effective hourly rate is too
• Time tracking software and a background check are required
• Payment terms are not stated in the ad

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as a remote task-based contract, confirmed open on 24 September 2026. The repositories, task mix, onboarding steps and per-task rate are the ad's own. See Mercor.