AI Is Changing Who WorksWe Help PeopleWork With It
Free training, real certification, real jobs. We retrain people displaced by AI automation as data annotators, evaluators, and RLHF trainers, then connect them to paid work at Scale AI, Surge AI, Mercor and others. Nothing costs anything.
Start from the job AI took
The skill that stopped paying is the one labs need
An engineer replaced by a coding assistant is the person best placed to judge whether that assistant is right. A contact centre worker replaced by an AI agent has heard every way those conversations fail. Each pathway names the trade and gives you the free track.
Software engineer
Code and reasoning evaluation
See the pathwayContact centre and front desk
Conversational and linguistic model training
See the pathwayWriter, editor, journalist
Prompt and response writing
See the pathwayTranslator and localisation specialist
Multilingual model evaluation
See the pathwayTeacher, tutor, trainer
Reasoning grading and rubric work
See the pathwayParalegal, bookkeeper, analyst, admin
Domain expert evaluation
See the pathway
All pathways, or tell us what you did if none of these is your old job.
The path · Free at every step
From displaced to working alongside AI
Five steps from the job automation took to paid work training and evaluating the models that took it. Nothing here costs anything, and there is no tier we are holding back.
- 01
Find your pathway
Start from the job AI automated. Each pathway names the evaluation work that pays for the same judgement.
See pathways → - 02
Assess
Take a free skills check on rubrics and model evaluation, and see where your judgement is weak.
Start the assessment → - 03
Train
Work through free courses from annotation foundations up to specialist code, reasoning, and language tracks.
See courses → - 04
Certify
Finish an assessed capstone, marked by a person, and get a certificate you can attach to applications.
View certification → - 05
Get placed
Tell us what you can do and we match you to live openings worth your time. Applications go to the employer.
Get placement support →
Market Intelligence
Top Data Annotation
Companies Hiring in 2026
Every foundation model still needs human training data. These companies hire data annotators, RLHF trainers, and AI evaluators. Open roles are listed below.
$2.1B
Global Market Size (2024)
$17.1B
Projected Market (2030)
41.2%
CAGR
500K+
Active Annotators Worldwide
Swipe the table sideways for revenue, founders, and headcount.
| Company | Founded | Revenue | Valuation | Founders | HQ | Team | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Scale AI jobs Scale AI is the leading AI data foundry behind frontier language models, autonomous vehicles, and U.S. government AI programs, providing human data labeling, RLHF, and model evaluation at scale. Official site | 2016 | $2B+ ARR | $29B | Alexandr WangLucy Guo | San Francisco, CA | 1,000+ | Unicorn |
Surge AI jobs Surge AI is a bootstrapped, zero-VC RLHF and data labeling platform built by Edwin Chen, powering frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google with high-quality human feedback and training data. Official site | 2020 | $1.4B+ ARR | $25B | Edwin Chen | San Francisco, CA | 100 to 150 | Hot |
Mercor jobs Mercor is an AI-native talent marketplace connecting vetted domain experts such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers directly with frontier AI labs for RLHF, evaluation, and specialized training data at massive scale. Official site | 2023 | $2B+ ARR | $20B | Brendan FoodyAdarsh HiremathSurya Midha | San Francisco, CA | 150 to 250 | Hot |
DataAnnotation jobs DataAnnotation hires remote contractors to train and evaluate AI models, from generalist review work to specialist tracks in coding, law, medicine, and finance. Its own site reports more than 100,000 contributors and over $150M paid out to date. Official site | - | Not disclosed | - | - | Remote | 100,000+ contributors | Hot |
Handshake AI jobs Handshake AI turns the career platform's network of 20M+ students, alumni, and PhD candidates into a data labeling and RLHF marketplace, supplying expert human feedback to frontier AI labs alongside its core recruiting business. Official site | 2013 | $1.1B+ ARR | $3.5B | Garrett Lord | San Francisco, CA | 1,000+ | Hot |
Micro1 jobs Micro1 is a fast-scaling AI training data platform that pivoted from its AI recruiting agent, Zara, into expert data labeling and RLHF, vetting doctors, lawyers, and engineers for frontier AI labs. Official site | 2022 | $300M+ ARR | $2.5B | Ali Ansari | Palo Alto, CA | 100 to 300 | Hot |
AfterQuery jobs AfterQuery is a Y Combinator-backed applied AI research lab building expert-curated datasets and RL environments that capture professional reasoning in law, medicine, finance, and engineering for frontier model training. Official site | 2025 | $100M+ ARR | $300M | Spencer MateegaCarlos Georgescu | San Francisco, CA | 30 to 40 | Hot |
HireCade jobs HireCade is a bootstrapped, founder-led AI recruiting and video interview platform that sources, vets, and places domain experts for AI data annotation and RLHF work with frontier AI labs. Official site | 2025 | $110 Million+ ARR | - | Ritu Ranjan | Remote | 12 | Growing |
Revenue and valuation figures come from public reports, Crunchbase, and industry estimates. Treat them as approximate, and check the company's own site before relying on any of them.
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Free training
Train for the work employers are actually screening for
Courses on rubrics, model evaluation, and specialist domains, every one of them free. Start at foundations.
AI Data Annotation Foundations
The vocabulary, rubrics, and quality habits every lab expects.
Passing AI Annotation Assessments
Why capable people fail entry tests, and how to stop.
RLHF and Model Evaluation
Preference data, output comparison, and safety judgement.
Browse by type
Free retraining by previous career
Common questions
Data annotation jobs FAQ
Is the training really free?
Yes, all of it. Every course, the skills assessment, the assessed certification, and placement support cost nothing. There is no paid tier, no card is ever requested, and we take no commission on what you earn. We are a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit.
Who funds it, if learners do not?
Grants, employer partners who fund cohorts and hire from them, and individual donations. Partners do not write the courses, do not get ranked above other employers on the job board, and do not receive learner details. The share each source represents is published on our impact page.
Who is this for?
People whose work AI automated, in whole or in part: software engineers displaced by coding assistants, contact centre and front desk staff replaced by AI agents, writers, translators, teachers, paralegals, and bookkeepers. The pathways map each previous career onto the AI work that pays for the same judgement. Nobody is turned away for having a different background.
What is a data annotation job?
Data annotators label text, images, audio, or video so machine learning models can learn. In 2026 that often means ranking chatbot answers, writing better responses, or checking whether an AI output is accurate and safe, not only drawing boxes on photos.
How much do data annotators make?
Pay on this board typically starts around $12/hr for entry level review work and reaches somewhere between $50 and $70/hr for senior, specialist, or on site QA. RLHF and expert domain evaluation usually sits above general labeling. Always check the listing, rates vary by company, location, and skill.
What is RLHF?
RLHF means reinforcement learning from human feedback. You compare two model answers, pick the better one, and often explain why. Labs use that preference data to align assistants. It is one of the most common well-paid remote AI trainer jobs.
Are data annotation jobs remote?
Most roles listed here are remote, including global and US-only remote. A few specialist jobs (for example autonomous-vehicle QA) may be on-site. Use the remote jobs page to see only work-from-home listings.
How do I apply?
Open a role on DataAnnotationJobs.org to read the details, then use Apply to go to the employer’s application. We aggregate openings from companies such as Scale AI, Surge AI, Mercor, Micro1, and HireCade, hiring happens on their sites.
Looking for a specific type of role? See RLHF jobs, data annotator salary, or all guides.