Data Engineering Expert (UK-Based, AI Lab Contract)
Listing checked September 5, 2026 · pay as published by Mercor
Overview
A leading AI laboratory needs an intensive four-week burst of real data engineering work. You will create the same professional documents and deliverables you handle in your normal job, working alongside experts from two other domains. Those outputs become the building blocks for tasks and rubrics that train and evaluate frontier AI models, so your daily judgment holds real weight. The project runs 40 hours per week from 14 September to 10 October 2026, with everyone coordinating on UK business hours. SQL, Python, and data warehousing skills are central, but the practical impact of your pipeline expertise matters most.
What You'll Do6
- 1Produce professional-grade deliverables, such as schemas, pipeline documentation, or data models, that reflect your daily data engineering practice.
- 2Work alongside experts from other technical domains to ensure outputs align with their perspectives and the evaluation goals.
- 3Log and structure the deliverables you create so they can be converted into training tasks and grading rubrics for frontier AI models.
- 4Apply your judgment to decide what a complete, correct deliverable looks like and capture the reasoning behind it.
- 5Depending on your role, build or document pipeline components, from ingestion through transformation and warehousing.
- 6Collaborate on a daily rhythm of UK business hours to review, refine, and finalize the set of artifacts.
Requirements6
- 1Hands-on experience building and owning production data pipelines, shown through a title like Data Engineer, Senior or Staff Data Engineer, Analytics Engineer, Data Platform Engineer, or Data Architect.
- 2Strong command of SQL and Python for pipeline development and data manipulation.
- 3Deep familiarity with ETL/ELT patterns, orchestration, streaming, and data warehousing solutions.
- 4Practical experience with at least one major tool from each layer: Spark or Kafka for processing, Airflow or dbt for orchestration, Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks for warehousing, and AWS, GCP, or Azure for cloud infrastructure.
- 5Willingness to work alongside experts in other domains and articulate your professional choices clearly.
- 6Based in the United Kingdom and holding the right to work there, without exception.
Who Should Apply
Experienced data engineers who build and own production pipelines will find this contract a natural fit. You should be comfortable producing clean, professional artifacts that mirror your everyday work, whether that means writing transformation logic, laying out warehousing schemas, or orchestrating data flows. The role is not for people who want to design novel architectures or spend weeks on exploratory work; the emphasis is on accurate, reproducible deliverables that reflect your practical knowledge. Candidates without UK residency and the right to work in the UK are screened out immediately, and interview screens also flag those who list pipeline tools without quantifiable outcomes or who lean purely on managerial experience instead of hands-on coding.
Salary Insight
The rate is stated as $140-$200 per hour, with the actual offer depending on your experience and role focus. Given the four-week, full-time commitment, you can expect a substantial contract payout, but the exact figure depends on the agreed hourly rate and your hours worked. This range sits at the higher end for contract data engineering roles because the project demands production-ready expertise without ramp-up time.
Pay and demand for Data Engineering roles
AggregatedTypical pay
$70/hour
This role
$140–$200/hr
Most Data Engineering roles pay $50–$100 per hour. This role's pay sits above that range.
Based on 679 similar roles that publish pay · 109 publish only a top rate; those count at the rate they gave
Rates shown per hour. Yearly and monthly pay converted; one-time fees and non-USD pay are not included.
- Live similar roles
- 791
- Listed in last 30 days
- 417
- Remote
- 96%
Hiring most right now: micro1 (394) · Mercor (124) · SME Careers (118)
Most requested skills · share of roles
- python14%
- llm evaluation7%
- ai training6%
- quality assurance5%
Figures from Data Engineering roles live on NearSkill when this page loaded. A role can close before you apply, so check the listing itself.
Compare your resume against these rolesLocation
Compensation
$140–200/hr
Required Skills
Application Tip
Aim your application directly at the hands-on aspects of your work. Instead of listing every tool you have touched, choose two or three pipelines you built end-to-end and be ready to describe the exact decisions you made in SQL and Python, the orchestration choices, and how you monitored data quality. Concrete metrics like 'reduced processing time by 30%' or 'cut data anomalies by half' will signal that you can deliver real-world outputs, which is precisely what this project needs.
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