Senior Python Engineer - AI Coding Agent Evaluation (Freelance)

About Mindrift

Mindrift connects specialists with project-based AI opportunities for leading tech companies, focused on testing, evaluating, and improving AI systems. Participation is project-based, not permanent employment.

What This Opportunity Involves

We're building a dataset to evaluate AI coding agents — how well a model handles real-world developer tasks.

You'll create challenging tasks and evaluation criteria within realistic simulated environments:

• Build realistic developer environments — a virtual company with codebase, infrastructure, and context (tickets, docs, conversations) that forms a believable development history
• Design tasks from intermediate states of these environments — craft the prompt, define what "solved" means, and ensure the task is solvable by an AI agent
• Write tests that verify agent solutions — accept all valid approaches and reject incorrect ones, neither too strict nor too lenient
• Iterate on tasks and tests based on QA feedback — review agent solutions, analyze failures, and refine until the evaluation is fair and robust

What This Is NOT

• Not data labeling
• Not prompt engineering
• Not writing code from scratch — the agent writes most of the code; you guide and evaluate

What We Look For

• 8+ years in software development
• Core stack: Python (FastAPI), JavaScript/TypeScript (React), Docker, Postgres, Kafka, Redis
• Experience writing tests (functional, integration)
• English proficiency — B2+

Why This Is Hard

Frontier models are already good at coding. Creating a task that genuinely challenges the best models is non-trivial. You need to deeply understand where models fail and what scenarios reveal the difference between a good and a bad solution. Tasks have many valid solutions — writing tests that accept all correct solutions and reject incorrect ones is harder than it sounds.

How It Works

Apply → Pass qualification(s) → Join a project → Complete tasks → Get paid

Effort Estimate

Tasks for this project are estimated to take 30 hours to complete, depending on complexity. This is an estimate and not a schedule requirement; you choose when and how to work. Tasks must be submitted by the deadline and meet the listed acceptance criteria to be accepted.

Compensation

Up to $200/hr equivalent, depending on level and pace. Tasks are estimated at ~30 hours each; you set your own schedule.