Audio Engineer

What you'll do

This is audio QA pointed at an unusual source. The material is recordings from robotic video data, so expect footage of machines doing things rather than music or voice sessions, and your ears are the instrument. You listen, decide what is wrong with the sound, and label it against the project's guidelines.

The ad names the defects it cares about: background noise, clipping, distortion, echo, hum and dropouts. Anyone who has cleaned up a location recording will know all six on sight. The work is to judge how clear and usable each clip is, put each problem in the right category, and add notes where a label alone would not explain it. Findings go back to the project team in writing.

The skill list includes audio restoration, but the task description is about diagnosing problems, not fixing them. Read that as: you need to know what a restorer would have to deal with, not necessarily do the repair.

Who fits

• Professional or academic experience in audio engineering, audio production, sound editing or a related field
• A solid ear for recording quality and the common ways a recording goes wrong
• Familiarity with audio editing or production tools
• Good written and spoken English
• Comfort working through video and audio clips alone, following a structured guideline without drifting

Preferred, not required: a degree in audio engineering, sound production or music technology, and prior audio QA, editing, annotation or media review work. Previous AI training or data annotation experience is listed as a plus only.

What it pays

$50–90/hour, micro1's published band. Nothing in the ad explains what places someone at $50 versus $90, so plan around the floor until an offer says otherwise. For defect labelling that does not ask for a degree, that floor is high; micro1's language transcription roles, for comparison, sit around $20–35.

Worth knowing

Good:

• 60 openings and a "High demand" tag, so this is volume hiring
• No AI background needed; studio, broadcast, post-production and live sound experience all count
• The defect categories are standard engineering vocabulary, so the learning curve is the guideline, not the craft
• Part time, which suits working engineers with gaps between sessions

Less good:

• Listening for hum and dropouts in clip after clip is repetitive, and consistency is part of the job
• Weekly hours, project length and the customer are not stated
• Contractor terms: no benefits, and you handle your own tax
• The ad does not say what monitoring setup is expected; good headphones will matter for catching low-level hum

About this listing

Posted by micro1 on its own jobs portal and read there on 29 September 2026. The $50–90/hour band, the 60 openings, the part-time contractor terms and the requirements above are from micro1's listing. micro1 also runs an Audio Expert role, which is a different job: transcribing choral recordings into MusicXML rather than diagnosing recording faults. See micro1.