Machine Learning Engineer (Freelance | Remote | Up to $35/hr)

Overview

Senior Machine Learning Engineer – LLM Evaluation / Task Creation (India Based)

Hourly Contract | Remote | $35 per hour

Role Description

Mercor is hiring Senior Machine Learning Engineers to collaborate with a leading AI research lab on the design, evaluation, and benchmarking of advanced machine learning systems. In this role, you will create high-quality ML tasks, datasets, and evaluation workflows that directly support the training and assessment of next-generation AI and LLM-based systems.

This position is ideal for engineers with strong applied ML experience and competitive ML backgrounds (e.g., Kaggle), who can translate real-world problem statements into robust, reproducible machine learning pipelines. You will work closely with researchers and engineers to ensure dataset quality, sound evaluation methodology, and impactful experimentation.

Key Responsibilities

• Frame and design novel ML problems to enhance the reasoning and performance of LLMs
• Build, optimize, and evaluate machine learning models across classification, prediction, NLP, recommendation, and generative tasks
• Run rapid experimentation cycles and iterate on model performance
• Perform advanced feature engineering and data preprocessing
• Conduct robustness testing, adversarial evaluation, and bias analysis
• Fine-tune and evaluate transformer-based models when required
• Maintain clear documentation for datasets, experiments, and modeling decisions
• Stay up to date with latest ML research, tools, and best practices

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of full-time experience in applied machine learning
• Technical degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Mathematics, or related field
• Demonstrated competitive ML experience (Kaggle, DrivenData, or equivalent)
• Evidence of strong performance in ML competitions (leaderboard rankings, medals, finalist placements)
• Strong proficiency in Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, and modern ML/NLP frameworks
• Solid understanding of statistics, optimization, model architectures, and evaluation techniques
• Experience with ML pipelines, experiment tracking, and distributed training
• Strong problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Fluency in English
• Must be based in India

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Kaggle Grandmaster/Master or multiple Gold Medals
• Experience creating ML benchmarks, evaluations, or challenge problems
• Background in LLMs, generative models, or multimodal learning
• Experience with large-scale distributed training
• Prior work in AI research, ML platforms, or infrastructure teams
• Contributions to open-source projects, blogs, or research publications
• Experience with LLM fine-tuning, vector databases, or generative AI workflows
• Familiarity with MLOps tools (Weights & Biases, MLflow, Airflow, Docker, etc.)
• Experience optimizing inference performance and deploying models at scale

Compensation & Contract

• Rate: $35 per hour
• Engagement: Independent contractor
• Work Mode: Fully remote and asynchronous
• Payments: Weekly via Stripe Connect

⚡ PS: Mercor reviews applications daily. Please complete your interview and onboarding steps to be considered for this opportunity. ⚡