Senior Software Engineer — Task Ideation
- Pay
- $20–$100 package
- Location
- Worldwide
- Type
- Contract
- Posted
- Oct 15, 2026
- Languages
- English
About the Opportunity
## About the Project
We build hard, verifiable command-line tasks used to evaluate frontier AI agents.
AI agents are good at the textbook. They still fail where experience matters: a default nobody questions, a rule nobody wrote down, a fix that looks right and isn't. Much of the work starts from real episodes from your own experience, such as a production incident, a performance problem, or a result that looked right but was wrong. These are captured through an AI-guided interview and turned into tasks.
Some engineers also pair with domain specialists (scientists, operations professionals, hardware engineers) and turn their expertise into working tasks.
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## Who we're looking for
- **Core Task Engineer:** senior generalist (backend, data or SRE), 5+ years at a real company, has handled production incidents and writes tests. Production Python plus Go, Rust, TypeScript or C++; Docker, pytest, advanced Linux. No specific domain needed.
- **Systems & Storage Specialist:** 6+ years working inside engines like Postgres, RocksDB, Kafka, Spark or the Linux kernel, not just using them. Production C, C++, Rust, Go or Scala; expert Linux (concurrency, I/O, ptrace).
- **ML Systems & Research Specialist:** ML infrastructure (GPUs, distributed training, serving), not notebook data science. MSc/PhD or 3–5 years in ML infra; PyTorch or JAX, CUDA or Triton.
- **Security Researcher:** AppSec, cryptography, forensics or firmware; 3+ years of CTF or 4+ years in industry. Python and C, Ghidra, QEMU. Published CTF challenges or credited CVEs are a strong signal.
- **Red-Team / QA Reviewer:** attacker mindset (CTF player, pentester, bug hunter); 4+ years in SWE, SRE or security, or 3+ years of CTF. Reviews tasks in every category and tries to pass the tests without solving the problem.
- **Benchmark Infra Engineer:** DevOps, SRE or platform, 5+ years; Docker/BuildKit, CI pipelines, cloud GPUs. Builds the environments tasks run on; does not write tasks.
- **Calibration Lead:** 7+ years; has led code review, QA or evaluation of technical work. Sets the quality bar and writes the guidelines. Excellent written English. Very few positions.
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## Responsibilities
Depending on your profile:
- Share real episodes from your work through AI-guided interviews, with concrete detail (tools, versions, files, error messages, numbers)
- Design and build tasks: Docker environment, instruction, reference solution and tests
- Pair with domain specialists to turn their expertise into working tasks
- Review tasks and try to break them: pass the tests without solving the problem
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## Project Details
Remote, task-based work in Vetto Arena. Compensation is paid per approved task.
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*This role is not about writing more code. It is about the hard problems you have solved, and turning them into tasks a program can check.*
Who Can Apply
- Proven professional experience in one of the profiles above, in production environments
- Strong coding skills and advanced Linux
- Concrete evidence of depth: commits to a major system, published challenges or CVEs, a real postmortem you owned, or a record of finding bugs in other people's code
- Comfortable working fully in English (reading and writing)
**Nice to have**
- Experience with test design or TDD
- Experience with large or complex codebases
- Experience using AI coding tools and knowing where they fall short
Languages
EN