Data Annotation Specialist (AI Safety)

Location: Remote within Canada or the United States; minimum commitment of 16 hours per week.

Compensation: CA$45 per hour in Canada or US$40 per hour in the United States, including base pay and hazard pay.

Company

Cohere develops and deploys frontier AI models for content generation, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, and AI agents.

What you will do

• Label, rank, audit, and refine human- and model-generated text to improve model safety, quality, and policy alignment.
• Evaluate outputs against detailed safety guidelines, rubrics, and style standards across ambiguous and sensitive cases.
• Create realistic prompts, user scenarios, and adversarial test cases to assess model behavior and identify unsafe, evasive, over-refusing, or policy-inconsistent responses.
• Identify annotation inconsistencies and provide feedback on recurring edge cases, model failures, and data-quality improvements.
• Complete high-volume annotation tasks accurately and independently in a globally distributed, asynchronous environment.

Requirements

• At least 1 year of experience in content moderation, trust and safety, AI data annotation, LLM evaluation, or a related analytical role.
• Experience applying detailed guidelines to complex and sensitive content, with strong contextual and sociocultural judgment and awareness of personal bias.
• Comfort working with explicit, unsafe, toxic, sexual, violent, or psychologically disturbing content.
• Excellent written English and the ability to clearly justify safety, quality, and policy evaluations.
• Strong attention to detail, accuracy, and consistency across high-volume and monotonous tasks.
• Strong time management, ability to learn new tools, and ability to work independently in a remote environment.
• Ability to commit to at least 16 hours per week.
• Ability to use a personal laptop; the role is BYOD.

Nice to have

• Experience with quality assurance, red teaming, and/or prompt engineering.
• Fluency in another language.

Culture & Benefits

• Part-time, remote independent-contractor engagement for 12 months, with potential extension.
• Work is project-based and continuous work is not guaranteed; workflow and compensation may fluctuate.
• Independent contractors may work with multiple clients, but must declare direct competitors and maintain Cohere project confidentiality.
• Contractors invoice for services and are not eligible for employee health or other benefits.
• The role includes potential exposure to explicit or otherwise disturbing content as part of safety annotation.

Hiring process

• Initial screening of the resume and writing samples.
• Virtual annotation test involving language-based tasks, a writing sample, and chatbot interaction.
• Short video screen with an Operations Team member, followed by an independent contractor agreement.