Software Engineers

The model writes code. You decide whether it can be shipped.

Backend, full-stack, platform and infrastructure engineers — if you have shipped software other people depended on and then had to keep it running, that experience is what these models are missing. We care about what you shipped, not whose logo is on it. Join CrowdGen’s network of software engineers, and we’ll bring you in when there’s work worth your time.

RemoteFlexible hoursIndependent contractor

Who we’re looking for.

A vetted network of practicing engineers.

✓5+ years shipping and operating production software — Code that ran somewhere real, with users who noticed when it didn’t. Side projects and coursework are welcome alongside that; they don’t replace it.
✓We care what you’ve run, not whose logo is on it — A bank, an insurer, a logistics firm, a government agency, or your own consultancy; they all count.
✓Architecture and debugging judgment — You can say why a design will fail under load or change, trace an intermittent failure back to its cause, and tell a critical defect from a style preference.
✓Clear written English — A lot of this work is explaining why something is wrong, not just knowing that it is.
✓Bonus skills — On-call and incident response, and the postmortems that came out of it; production depth in a second language across a different ecosystem; or migrations run under constraint — zero-downtime cutovers, backwards-compatible schema changes, deprecations with live consumers.

To join: A LinkedIn profile and a resume showing your education and experience are required to qualify.

What you’d actually do.

The work any experienced engineer would recognize.

01
Break it the way production would
Build the cases that expose what the model assumed away: the race under concurrency, the dependency that times out, the migration that runs against real data, the config that differs between staging and prod.
02
Write the fix the model couldn’t
Take the bug it declared fixed, find what it actually changed, and produce the correct change with the diagnosis it should have reached made explicit.
03
Develop comprehensive code quality rubrics
Define what makes production-quality code: service boundaries and contracts that hold under load and change, tests that fail when they should, and a critical defect told apart from a style preference — so output is scored against strict code review.
04
Code alongside the model and find where it stops working
Take a real task through an agentic session and mark the exact point where its plan starts to fail and the structure breaks down.

Questions, answered.

What is CrowdGen?+

CrowdGen is the contributor platform of Appen, a publicly traded data company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the code APX. Founded in 1996, Appen has been present at every major inflection point in AI — from early speech recognition to frontier reasoning models. Today, 80% of the world’s leading LLM builders are Appen customers. Through CrowdGen, you can use your professional expertise to contribute to frontier AI development and research.

What happens after I get accepted into CrowdGen?+

Joining the network is a qualification step — once your application is approved, we make matching projects available to you, and we reach out when one fits your background.

Why do you need my LinkedIn and resume?+

Because we vet everyone in the network. Seeing your real background is how we make sure the work we send you is actually matched to your experience. A LinkedIn profile and a resume showing your education and experience are required to qualify.

Ready when you are.

Once you submit your profile, our team reviews it and follows up within 72 hours if your background matches what we’re looking for.

Qualify Now