Applied AI Engineer (Contract)

About this role

Company Intro

At
Toloka AI
we create data that powers leading GenAI models and innovations. We work with frontier labs, big tech, renowned AI startups, enterprises and non-profit research organizations worldwide. We use a combination of Experts + Crowd + Tech Platform to teach AI models to reason and evaluate their efficacy and safety. We have experts in more than 50 different domains - from doctors and lawyers to physicists and engineers - and boast one of the most diverse global crowds,
representing over
100 countries and speaking 40+ languages
. We are a well-funded startup with an enviable portfolio of clients including
Anthropic
,
Amazon
,
Microsoft
,
Poolside
,
Recraft
, and
Shopify
.

Recently, we secured strategic investment led by
Bezos Expeditions
and
Nebius Group
with participation from
Mikhail Parakhin
,
CTO of Shopify
and board advisor to leading GenAI companies, who now serves as our Chairman of the Board. Our remote-first team is globally distributed around the world:
USA
,
UK
,
the Netherlands
,
Serbia
, and more.

About position

Companies increasingly want their own models instead of paying for frontier APIs. A typical case: an enterprise client running a customer-support agent on a proprietary model wants a fine-tuned open-weight model that matches its quality at a fraction onef the cost. You'll own these engagements technically, end to end.

You'll sit down with the client's team to understand the use case. You'll recommend the right model, technique and data. Then you'll build it: fine-tuning, evaluation and handover. Behind you is Toloka's expert workforce and data platform, which produce the training and evaluation data.

This is a hands-on engineering role with real client exposure:
roughly 60% building
and
experimenting
,
40% working with clients
. Sales owns the commercial relationship. You own the technical answer.

What you'll do

**Client discove...