Senior Python Engineer - AI Coding Agent… at Mindrift · Portugal

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: Paid per accepted task. Your rate depends on the qualification tier you reach and how efficiently you complete tasks — up to the equivalent of $150/hr. Because payment is per task, a faster pace raises your effective hourly rate.