Remote Quantitative ML & Competitive Data Science Specialist — AI Research & Domain Evaluation

ZR Talent Group is recruiting a qualified Remote Quantitative ML & Competitive Data Science Specialist — AI Research & Domain Evaluation for a 100% remote contract opportunity ($60 - $120/hour) open to candidates across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa. In this specialist engagement, you will collaborate with advanced AI research teams to design domain-specific evaluation scenarios, audit complex model reasoning, and establish gold-standard reference solutions in ML Engineering, Data Science, Mathematics, Coding.

Prior experience building machine learning systems is not required—our research partners value authentic practitioner judgment, domain rigor, and clear analytical writing.

Key Responsibilities & Deliverables

• Build reproducible environments, prepare relevant data and dependencies, and implement reference solutions.
• Develop tests and evaluation criteria that reliably distinguish correct solutions from incomplete or flawed approaches.
• Run coding agents against tasks, investigate their failures, and refine the tasks based on observed behavior.
• Identify implementation errors, flawed assumptions, data leakage, and other issues that affect correctness.
• Document task requirements, solution reasoning, and verification steps clearly.

Required Qualifications & Technical Criteria

• Demonstrated experience in data science, ML, quantitative modeling, or relevant research competitions. (Kaggle, DrivenData, etc.)
• Strong problem-solving ability and a clear understanding of the methods you use.
• Practical programming ability sufficient to implement and verify your own solutions.
• Relevant competition platforms include Kaggle, DrivenData, Zindi, AIcrowd, Numerai, DataSource.ai, and CodaLab/Codabench.
• Huge Pluses
• Strong coding experience, particularly in Python, including testing, debugging, and working with unfamiliar code

Compensation, Remote Eligibility & Schedule

• Compensation Band: $60 - $120/hour
• Work Model: 100% Remote / Work From Home with flexible asynchronous scheduling
• Eligible Remote Locations: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa
• Current Openings: 50 active specialist positions
• Hiring Organization: ZR Talent Group
• Core Skills & Technologies: ML Engineering, Data Science, Mathematics, Coding