There are six to eight million unfilled AI roles worldwide and demand is running roughly ten times ahead of supply. We connect UK professionals directly to those roles through Mercor — the recruiting platform hiring for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and hundreds of AI companies.
Live ranges from roles currently open, not last year’s survey data. Fully remote unless stated.
Highest band. The bottleneck has moved from building models to running them.
The highest volume of open roles, and the broadest range of employers.
Strongest demand in fintech, health and logistics.
Increasingly bundled into wider AI engineering roles.
You are never charged. We are paid by employers, which is how it should be.
Your skills, the roles you want and what you would need to move. Two minutes, and no CV upload at this stage.
Mercor evaluates actual technical ability rather than keyword-matching a CV. A strong portfolio counts for more than a specific degree.
You are put in front of companies actively hiring, and we keep checking in monthly as new roles open.
micro1 is a data lab rather than an agency. It pays domain experts by the hour to build the training data, reinforcement-learning environments and evaluations that frontier models learn from, through its Realm, Cortex and Robotics programmes. If you are a qualified accountant, engineer, designer or clinician, your day-job expertise is the product. Openings change weekly.
Software engineering, front-end, product management, UX and product design, technical writing.
Qualified accountants applying real tax judgement to model training and evaluation.
Financial reasoning work, including spreadsheet-grounded analysis.
360° and exocentric video recording for embodied AI. No prior AI experience needed.
They are often mentioned in the same breath and they do quite different things. This is the comparison we give people who ask us directly.
| Mercor | micro1 | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A recruiting platform | A data lab |
| Type of work | Permanent and contract roles with AI companies | Paid project work training and evaluating AI models |
| How you are paid | Salary, by the employer who hires you | By the hour, by micro1, for hours you log |
| Typical range | £45,000 – £130,000 a year | $20 – $140 an hour |
| Commitment | Full time in most cases | Fits around a job you already have |
| Who it suits | ML engineers, data scientists, MLOps, product | Accountants, lawyers, clinicians, engineers, designers |
| Assessment | Technical evaluation of actual ability | Screening against the specific project |
| Cost to you | Nothing | Nothing |
The phrase “training AI” does very little to explain the job. In practice it comes down to four kinds of task, and most people end up doing one of them.
Most tasks ask you to work a problem the way you would at work, and to show why. A tax adviser might be given a client scenario and asked to set out the treatment and the reasoning behind it. The reasoning is the valuable part, because that is what the model learns from.
You are shown what an AI produced and asked where it went wrong. A radiologist spots an overstated finding. A solicitor spots a citation that does not exist. This is what micro1 calls evaluation, and it is where domain expertise is hardest to fake.
Robotics work is different again. You wear a 360 degree camera and perform ordinary tasks so that embodied systems have something real to learn from. It pays less, around $20 an hour, and needs no technical background at all.
The most technical strand. You construct the simulated settings an agent is tested against, which is closer to software engineering than to annotation.
The barrier is lower than most people assume, though not in the way they expect.
For expert work the qualification that matters is the one you already have. A chartered accountant is valuable because they are a chartered accountant. Roughly half the openings on our referral board at any time are for professions outside technology.
Both platforms assess before they place. Mercor tests technical ability rather than reading a CV, and micro1 screens against the specific project. Overstating your level wastes an afternoon and gets you nowhere.
Nearly all of this work is producing written reasoning. If your explanation is unclear, it is not useful as training data, however good the underlying judgement.
Neither route begins with uploading a CV and waiting. You register, you are assessed, and you are matched. Expect the first stage to take under ten minutes.
The part nobody puts on a landing page. None of this is complicated, but it is better known before you start than after.
Both platforms engage you as a contractor. Nobody deducts tax at source, and there is no holiday pay or pension. That is normal for this kind of work, but it does mean the money arriving is not the money you keep.
Pay is set in US dollars and lands in sterling, so what you actually receive moves with the exchange rate and with whatever your bank or payment provider charges to convert it. Worth checking before you judge an hourly rate.
Hourly expert work is designed to be done in the evenings or at weekends. Check your employment contract first if you have one, since some contain clauses about outside work.
Earning more than the trading allowance from self-employment generally means filing a Self Assessment return. Thresholds and rules change, so check the current position on GOV.UK or ask an accountant. We are a technology company, not tax advisers.
No. Applying is completely free for candidates and always will be. We are paid by employers, never by the people we place.
We focus on UK-based professionals, but the roles themselves are remote and global. You work from wherever you are.
Most of these roles want demonstrable technical ability rather than a particular degree. Mercor assesses skills directly, so a strong portfolio or track record can matter more than a CV.
An AI recruiting platform valued at $10 billion after its $350M Series C in October 2025. It recruits for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and hundreds of high-growth AI companies. Phantomhive is a UK partner.
We are paid by employers when placements succeed. That is the whole model, which is exactly why we will never ask you for a penny.
Mercor places people into roles at AI companies and is paid by the employer. micro1 is a data lab that pays experts by the hour to help train and evaluate models. Mercor is a job. micro1 is paid work you can do around a job.
Yes, and plenty of people do. They are not competitors and neither asks for exclusivity. Applying to one has no bearing on the other.
No. Both assess demonstrable ability. A strong portfolio or a professional qualification such as CPA, EA or chartered status carries more weight than a degree certificate.
Registration takes a few minutes. How long it takes to be matched depends on your field and what is open at the time. Openings on the micro1 board change weekly.
None, on either platform. If anyone asks you to pay to access AI work, that is not how this industry operates and you should walk away.
We are paid a referral fee by the platforms when a placement works out. You are never charged, and we have no reason to push you toward a role that does not fit.
Book a free 30‑minute technical consultation
Book now ↗Ask about services, pricing or data — or answer three questions.
phantomhive®