Data Annotation Specialist, Safety

Role overview

Cohere is hiring a Data Annotation Specialist, Safety, as a part-time, remote, independent contractor role available within Canada or the United States, with a minimum commitment of 16 hours per week at 45 CAD/hour or 40 USD/hour depending on location, on a 12-month contract with potential for extension. The role improves large language model safety by labeling, ranking, auditing, prompting, red teaming, and correcting output, and suits candidates with backgrounds in trust and safety, content moderation, or AI model evaluation.

Important notice: the role involves intentional exposure to explicit content, as described in full in the original posting.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate and improve model safety: label, rank, audit, and refine human- and model-generated text to improve safety, quality, and policy alignment, including content that may be sexual, violent, or psychologically disturbing
• Apply nuanced safety judgment: assess model outputs against detailed safety guidelines, rubrics, and style standards, making consistent decisions across ambiguous, sensitive, and context-dependent cases
• Create prompts and safety test cases: write realistic prompts, user scenarios, and adversarial examples that evaluate model behavior across safety categories and uncover unsafe, evasive, over-refusing, or policy-inconsistent responses
• Support quality and calibration: identify annotation inconsistencies or unclear guidelines, and provide actionable feedback on recurring edge cases, model failures, and opportunities to improve data quality
• Work with precision and independence: complete annotation tasks with strong attention to detail, while working independently in a globally distributed, asynchronous team environment

Qualifications

• 1+ years 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 the ability to recognize and manage personal bias
• Emotional resilience: comfort working with content that contains unsafe, explicit, or toxic content, including content of a sexual, violent, or psychologically disturbing nature
• Excellent command of written English and the ability to clearly justify content evaluations, including why an output is safe, unsafe, high-quality, or low-quality
• Strong attention to detail and commitment to accuracy, with the ability to maintain consistency across high-volume and monotonous tasks
• Strong execution in a remote environment, including good time management, comfort using new tools, and the ability to work independently in a global, asynchronous team

Application conditions

• Location is limited to Canada or the United States; remote does not mean worldwide eligibility, so check residency and work authorization in the original posting
• This is a part-time, remote, independent contractor position, with a minimum commitment of 16 hours per week, at 45 CAD/hour or 40 USD/hour depending on location, consisting of base pay plus hazard pay
• The contract runs for 12 months with potential for extension, and continuous work is not guaranteed; the posting states that workflow and pay will fluctuate with organizational needs
• This role is bring your own device, and independent contractors are not eligible for health benefits or other benefits provided to employees
• The role involves exposure to explicit content, including content of a sexual, violent, or psychologically disturbing nature, and the posting asks applicants to be prepared for that

Preferred qualifications

• Exposure to quality assurance, red teaming, or prompt engineering
• Fluency in another language in addition to excellent written English

Compensation…