Senior Python Engineer - AI Coding Agent Evaluation (Freelance)

Please submit your CV in English and indicate your level of English proficiency. 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 paidEffort 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. Originally posted on Himalayas