About Surge AI Surge AI partners with the world's leading AI labs to build the benchmarks and RL environments that train and evaluate frontier models. Most benchmarks cut corners because expert humans are expensive.

Our model is the opposite: we pay experts enough that we don't have to.

Position Senior Software

Engineer (Agentic Coding RL Environments) Type Contract Compensation $100–150+/hour ($200–300k+/year). Rates scale with your experience, and many go past the top of that range.

Location: Fully remote, any time zone Role Responsibilities Build coding RL environments and benchmarks that test how agents perform on realistic software engineering tasks

Design tasks based on real engineering work

Review and red-team model output to surface meaningful failures

Write the tests, rubrics, and success criteria that separate good work from slop

Give structured feedback that improves future models Qualifications (Must-Have) Professional software engineering experience shipping real, scaled production systems





Expertise in at least one common tech stack (TypeScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, Rust, Go, or C++)

Strong judgment about what "valuable code" and a "meaningful model failure" look like

Comfort working independently, and giving direct, code-review-style feedback

Availability for a meaningful commitment (most contributors work 20 to 40+ hours per week) Note You do not need prior AI or ML experience. Strong engineering judgment and attention to detail matter most.

What Makes This Different

No managers, 1:1s, OKR ceremonies, or Jira backlog grooming

You choose when and where you work

You are judged on the quality of what you produce, not speed Application Process Coding capability screen (replaces a multi-round interview loop)

ID verification

Background check

Paid first real task. Do well, and you're on the team. Questions?: Email [email protected]

📌 Senior Software Engineer (Agentic Coding RL Environments) (Calgary)
🏢 DataAnnotation
📍 Calgary