Which AI Training Companies Are Hiring Expert Raters Right Now
Six AI training data companies are hiring expert raters right now. Live role counts by platform, real listings with pay, and what quality rater, content rater and response rater mean in practice.
Six AI training data companies are hiring expert raters right now, and between them they have around 2,795 live contract roles open.
Most pages answering this question name a few platforms and leave you to work out whether any of them are still hiring. This one counts. Figures below are live listing data as of October 4, 2026.
Everything counted here is a contract role. Salaried positions at these companies are a separate thing and they are excluded, so the numbers below describe the rater work you can apply for as a contractor.
Mercor carries about half the volume, and almost none of it is labeled "rater"
- Six companies are hiring: Mercor, Micro1, SME Careers, Ethos, AfterQuery and Turing.
- Mercor holds the largest share, with 1,400 of the 2,795 live contract roles.
- Ethos states a rate on every listing, from $35 to $225/hr.
- Almost none of them use the word rater in the job title. They post your profession instead, which is why the roles are hard to find by searching for rater jobs.
- All six are remote and contract-based, with flexible hours inside a weekly range.
- A search quality rater job is something else, and it usually pays less than the AI expert roles here.
- Applying to two or three platforms beats waiting on one, because project availability moves independently at each.
Six companies are hiring expert raters right now
Each row counts live contract listings we have seen in the last 14 days. The total across all six sits at 2,795 open rater roles.
| Company | Live rater roles | What they hire for | Where to look |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mercor | 1,400 | Broadest volume, weighted to STEM and professional expertise | Read the Mercor review |
| Micro1 | 359 | Widest spread of named specialisms, from music annotation to legal review | See open Micro1 roles |
| SME Careers | 260 | Quality assurance, adjudication and red-teaming leads | See open SME Careers roles |
| Ethos | 201 | A stated rate on every listing, up to $225/hr | See open Ethos roles |
| AfterQuery | 216 | Hires by profession, one listing per occupation | See open AfterQuery roles |
| Turing | 359 | Named rater roles tied to specific models and locales | See open Turing roles |
| Total | 2,795 | Live contract roles as of October 4, 2026 | |
The spread matters more than the total. Mercor alone carries 50% of the open rater work across the six platforms, which makes it an obvious first application, though it also means the largest pool of people applying alongside you. The smaller boards move faster.
Expert rater describes the work rather than the job title
Searching for expert rater jobs returns very little from these six companies, and that is a vocabulary problem rather than a hiring one. The work is everywhere and the word almost never appears in the listing. Platforms post the profession they need, so the same job reaches you as Nurse Practitioner Expert, Software Engineer AI Reviewer, or Business Analyst.
What you do inside those roles is consistent across all six. You are shown something a model produced, a diagnosis, a contract clause, a block of code, a piece of audio, and you judge it against what you know from your own working life. Then you write down where it went wrong and why, in enough detail that an engineer can use it.
The expert half of the phrase is the part that sets the rate. Anyone can say an answer looks wrong. Platforms pay for the person who can say which step of the reasoning broke and what the correct answer is, and that is why rates on these listings run well above general annotation work. Our guide to rubrics in AI training covers how that judgment gets structured once you are inside a project.
These are real listings open as this page was built
One live role from each platform, pulled from the same dataset as the counts above. Each card links to the full listing with its own pay, requirements and application route.
Music & Sound Annotation Expert
$30-45
/hr
Red-Teaming Quality Assurance Lead (QAL)
$80-100
Business Analyst - US Educational Raters - Gemini
$25-35
/hr
The range in that handful of cards is the real picture of this market. A US educational rater role on Turing lists $30/hr, a music and sound annotation specialist on Micro1 lists $30 to $45/hr, and an Ethos software engineering reviewer lists $150/hr. The gap is scarcity rather than difficulty, because the pool of people who can review production code is small enough to move the rate card in your favor.
Mercor carries 50% of the open rater roles
Mercor is carrying 1,400 live contract roles, which is around 50% of everything open across the six platforms. The listings skew towards STEM and licensed professions, and a large share attach the domain to a hardware or product context, as with the iOS and macOS expert role in the cards above.
That volume makes the platform worth understanding before you apply, not after. Mercor screens through an AI interview and leans heavily on what your profile says about your background, so the two things worth getting right are the profile and the interview.
We have four guides on it: our Mercor review for how the platform works and what it pays, the Mercor AI interview guide for the screening call, profile optimization for getting matched to more roles, and instant offers for the roles that skip the queue entirely.
Micro1 runs the widest spread of named specialisms
Micro1 has 359 live contract roles, and the striking thing is how narrow each one is. Music and sound annotation, legal review, medical coding and dozens of others sit as separate listings rather than as one catch-all expert role. If your background is specific, there is a decent chance a listing names it.
Screening runs through Zara, the platform AI interviewer, and the profile works on a bucket system that decides which specialisms you get shown for. Getting the bucket right is most of the work. Our Micro1 review covers pay and how the platform operates, the AI interview guide covers the format, my own Zara interview writeup covers what it feels like to sit through one, and the bucket strategy guide covers the profile.
Browse the open Micro1 roles to see which specialisms are live this week.
SME Careers hires raters into QA and red-teaming leads
SME Careers is running 260 live contract roles, weighted towards the senior end of rating work. Quality assurance leads, adjudicators and red-teaming roles appear regularly, which is rating work with responsibility for other people's output attached. The red-teaming QA lead in the cards above is listed with a ceiling of $100/hr.
It hires in any country Deel pays out to, which makes it a strong option if you are outside the US, UK and EU and keep hitting country limits elsewhere. Applications run through an AI interview, a written assessment and a recruiter interview.
Our SME Careers review covers the platform, and the application and assessment guide walks through what the written stage asks for. See what is open now.
Ethos states a rate on every listing, up to $225/hr
Ethos has 201 live contract roles, each with a stated rate from $35 to $225/hr. The roles are built around senior professional experience, so the AI reviewer expert titles pair a profession with the reviewing work, as with the software engineer role in the cards above.
Ethos screens with a conversational AI interview that walks through your career history rather than testing you on the domain. It is closer to a recruiter call than an exam, and it is short. Our Ethos review covers the platform and its rate bands, and the Ethos AI interview guide covers the call.
If you have ten years or more in a professional field, Ethos is built around that kind of seniority. Browse the open Ethos roles.
Find the specialism that matches your background
Pays twice a month in USD (Deel)
Micro1 posts rating work by named specialism instead of one generic expert role, so it is the fastest place to check whether your exact profession is being hired for this week.
AfterQuery hires by profession, one listing per occupation
AfterQuery has 216 live contract roles, each with a stated rate. Most are hourly, at a median of $85, and its audio recording roles pay per completed task.
The structure is one listing per occupation, which makes the board easy to scan. Tax attorney, medical coder, veterinarian, network engineer and notary public all sit as separate roles, and you apply to the one that matches your credentials. It is the cleanest fit on this list if your profession is licensed and specific.
Our AfterQuery review covers how the company works and what people report earning. See the open roles to check whether your occupation is listed.
Turing names the model and the locale in the role itself
Turing has 359 live contract roles, and its titles are the most explicit about what you would be working on. The US educational raters role in the cards above names both the model and the market, which is unusual on this list and useful when you are deciding whether a project suits you.
Turing publishes no rate on most of its roles; that one lists $30/hr, and the figures on its other cards are our estimates. Turing also posts generalist roles alongside its expert ones, which makes it a reasonable first platform if you are moving into this work without a specialist credential.
Our Turing AI training review covers the platform and how its projects run. Browse the open Turing roles.
Quality rater, content rater and response rater are mostly the same job
People search for this work under half a dozen names, and the distinctions between most of them are thinner than they look. AI quality rater, AI content rater, AI response rater and AI evaluator all describe judging model output against a standard. Where they differ is emphasis rather than task.
- AI quality rater puts the weight on scoring, usually against a rubric with defined bands.
- AI content rater tends to appear where the output is text or media and safety review is part of the job.
- AI response rater is the term you see for conversational output, often comparing two model answers and choosing the better one.
- Expert rater and subject matter expert signal that domain credentials are required, and these sit at the higher-paying end.
None of these six platforms use those phrases as job titles, which is the practical takeaway. Searching a job board for AI rater jobs will miss most of the work described on this page. Searching your own profession finds it.
A search quality rater job is a different job with a similar name
Search quality rater roles, the kind long associated with vendors such as RWS, Appen and TELUS, sit next to this market without being part of it. A search quality rater evaluates search results and ads against a published rating guideline, and the guideline does the judging rather than your professional background. The skill is in applying someone else's standard consistently.
Expert rating on the six platforms above inverts that. There is no long guideline to memorize, and the reason you were hired is the knowledge you already carry from your own field. That difference shows up in the pay: TELUS, a long-running search rating vendor, posts a median of $10 an hour on our board, while the roles counted on this page run from about $30 an hour at the entry end to $225 for senior reviewers.
Both are legitimate remote work and plenty of people have done both. If you arrived here from a search quality rater background, you already have the discipline this work rewards, and the step up is applying with your profession rather than with your rating experience.
How to get hired as an AI rater this month
The pattern that works is unglamorous and it holds across all six platforms.
- Apply to two or three platforms rather than one. Project availability moves independently at each company, so a quiet month on one is rarely a quiet month everywhere.
- Search your profession instead of the word rater. Your job title is what these listings are indexed under.
- Put the specific tools and subfields on your profile. Matching runs on the concrete details, and a profile that says senior engineer gets shown fewer roles than one naming the languages and systems.
- Prepare for an AI interview at Mercor, Micro1, Ethos and SME Careers. Each screens with one, they are short, and our interview guides cover the format for each platform.
- Take the assessment seriously at SME Careers. It adds a written assessment after the AI interview.
- Reapply when the board changes. These counts move week to week, and a specialism that is absent today is often listed two weeks later.
If you are starting from scratch rather than switching platforms, our guide on becoming an AI trainer covers the ground before the application, and how to find AI training jobs covers where the rest of the market posts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which AI training data companies are hiring expert raters right now? ▼
Six of them, with roughly 2,795 live contract roles between them: Mercor, Micro1, SME Careers, Ethos, AfterQuery and Turing. Mercor carries the largest share by a wide margin, and the figures move week to week as platforms post and close roles.
What is an expert rater job in AI training? ▼
An expert rater judges AI output against their own professional knowledge. You read what a model produced, decide whether it is correct and useful, and explain where it went wrong. The word expert means the platform is buying your domain background, so a nurse rates clinical answers and a lawyer rates legal ones.
Are AI rater jobs remote? ▼
Nearly all of them are remote and contract-based. Work is asynchronous and hours are usually flexible within a weekly range. Some roles carry a country restriction or a timezone overlap requirement, and each listing states that where it applies.
What do AI quality rater jobs pay? ▼
Rates vary by platform and by how narrow the expertise is. Across the live listings on this page, a Turing rater listing states $30/hr, Micro1 specialist annotation roles sit around $30 to $45/hr, and Ethos roles reach $225/hr. Pay tracks scarcity, so a role only a few thousand people can do pays a multiple of a generalist one.
Is an AI content rater the same as an AI response rater? ▼
Yes. Platforms use the terms interchangeably. Both describe judging model output for quality, accuracy and safety. Job titles on these six platforms more often name your profession, so you are likelier to find the same work posted as Nurse Practitioner Expert or Software Engineer AI Reviewer.
Is a search quality rater job the same as an AI rater job? ▼
No, they are different jobs with similar names. A search quality rater evaluates search engine results against a published rating guideline, usually through an outsourcing vendor. An AI expert rater evaluates model output and is paid for domain expertise rather than for applying a guideline. The AI roles generally pay more and ask for a professional background.
Do I need a degree to get an AI rater job? ▼
Most roles ask for professional experience rather than a specific degree, though the highest-paying research and reviewer roles usually want an advanced degree or several years in the field. Mercor and Micro1 list plenty of roles in the first camp. Our guide on AI jobs without a degree covers the routes that stay open.
How often do the numbers on this page change? ▼
Every night. A role counts while we have seen it in the last 14 days, so a platform that pauses hiring drops out of the count within two weeks rather than lingering as a stale figure.
Related guides
AI training platform comparison: interview rates, hours commitment and contract length for these same platforms, taken from the listings.
Best AI training platforms reviewed: the wider field, including the platforms that hire generalists rather than experts.
What rubrics are in AI training: the scoring structure most rating work runs on once you are inside a project.
How to become an AI trainer: the route in if you have the domain background and none of the platform experience.
AI jobs without a degree: which of these roles stay open when the listing asks for credentials you do not have.
Running several platforms at once: how people turn contract rating work into a full-time income.
Cite this page
"Which AI Training Companies Are Hiring Expert Raters Right Now", aitrainer.work, aitrainer.work/guides/ai-training-companies-hiring-expert-raters
MSc Human-Computer Interaction | Founder
Pietro is the founder and technical lead of aitrainer.work. He builds and maintains the platform's data pipeline, certification infrastructure, and editorial standards.