AI/ML Expert

Job Details

Outlier helps the world's most innovative companies improve their AI models by providing human feedback. Are you an experienced Machine Learning / AI Expert who would like to lend your expertise to train AI models?

About the opportunity:

• Outlier is looking for talented Machine Learning and AI Experts to help train generative artificial intelligence models.
• This freelance opportunity is remote and hours are flexible, so you can work whenever is best for you.

You may contribute your expertise by…

• Review ML papers. Analyze research papers on ML, systems, and optimization to build challenge problems for agents that learn through recursive feedback.
• Build evals. Write the automated graders and verifiers that score an agent’s attempt and set the rewards.
• Catch reward hacking. Author LLM-judged rubrics that distinguish a genuine solve from an agent gaming the metric or hard-coding its way to a high score.
• Test with frontier models. Run top models against your problem and check that stronger ones outperform weaker ones — and that performance climb across the recursive iterations.
• Analyze the trajectories. Review what the model actually did across iterations, diagnose where it failed, and confirm gains come from the feedback loop, not luck.
• Document it. Capture the problem design, why it’s hard, how each model performed, and what the failure modes reveal.

Examples of desirable expertise:

• A completed PhD (degree awarded) in Computer Science, Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics / Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Electrical or Computer Engineering, Physics, Computational Linguistics / NLP, Robotics, Operations Research, Computational Neuroscience, or Computational Biology / Bioinformatics, with 2+ years of hands-on Machine Learning / AI work after starting the PhD (industry roles, postdoc, research residency, ML internships, or ML research during the PhD all count)

• Current enrollment in a PhD program in one of the fields above, with a research area that is Machine Learning / AI or clearly ML-adjacent

• A completed Master's or Bachelor's in one of the fields above, with 1+ year of hands-on Machine Learning / AI work (an ML/AI role, ML work inside a broader engineering or data role, or a research assistant / research engineer role in an ML lab)

• Current enrollment in a Master's program in Computer Science or a closely related computational field at a US technical university, with visible Machine Learning / AI research or project work

• Ability to write clearly and precisely about Machine Learning and AI concepts in fluent English

Payment :

• Currently, pay rates for core project work by Machine Learning / AI expert is up to $150 USD per hour
• Rates vary based on expertise, skills assessment, location, project need, and other factors. For example, higher rates may be offered to PhDs. For non-core work, such as during initial project onboarding or project overtime phases, lower rates may apply. Certain projects offer incentive payments. Please review the payment terms for each project.