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 virtual companies following a high-level plan - codebase, infrastructure, and context (conversations, documentation, tickets) that form a realistic environment with development history
Assemble and calibrate tasks from intermediate states of the virtual company: craft the prompt, define evaluation criteria, and ensure the task is solvable and the evaluation is fair
Design tasks set in isolated environments - emulations of a developer's workstation: a Linux machine with development tools (terminal, CLI), MCP servers (repository, task tracker, messenger, documentation, etc.), and a real web application codebase
Write tests that accept all correct solutions and reject incorrect ones - neither too strict (breaking on valid approaches) nor too lenient (passing bad ones)
Iterate with an AI agent on tests - verifying they catch real problems, don't miss bad solutions, and don't break on good ones
Review code written by agents, analyze why an agent failed or succeeded, and design edge cases and adversarial scenarios
Iterate based on feedback from expert QA reviewers who score your work on quality criteria
Not data labeling
Not prompt engineering
Not writing code from scratch - the agent writes most of the code; you guide and evaluate

Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related fields
5+ years in software development, primarily Python (FastAPI, pytest, async/await, subprocess, file operations)
Background in full-stack development, with experience building React-based interfaces (JavaScript/TypeScript) and robust back-end systems
Experience writing tests (functional, integration - not just running them)
Docker containers, and familiarity with infrastructure tools (Postgres, Kafka, Redis)
CI/CD understanding (GitHub Actions as a user: triggers, labels, reading results)
English proficiency - B2

1 Part time Tech / Digital / IT jobs in Accrington, Lancashire