Java developer Jobs in Elgin, IL

Software Engineer$20 - $75/hourpay

Required Skills

JavaScriptTypescriptJAVAC#C++GoLangRuby

About micro1

micro1 is the leading AI data lab for training frontier models and evaluating AI agents. Experts contribute their diverse subject matter knowledge across domains such as finance, healthcare, STEM engineering, and more. micro1 transforms that real-world expertise into high-quality training data, evaluations, and feedback loops that improve how AI systems learn, reason, and perform.

Our platform identifies and vets top talent through an AI recruiter, enabling high-quality expert contributions at scale. We aim to enable 1 billion people to do meaningful work by applying their expertise to AI. As our global expert network grows, micro1 is building the human intelligence layer for frontier AI.

Job Title: Software Engineering

Job Type: Contractor (10-15 hours per week)

Location: Remote

Job Summary:

We are looking for experienced software engineers to help train and evaluate next-generation AI systems through real-world software engineering tasks. This role is best suited for developers who can reason through unfamiliar codebases, explain engineering decisions clearly, and solve practical backend, full-stack, systems, or infrastructure-related problems.

A Cybersecurity/SecOps background or exposure is highly preferred

No prior AI experience is required. What matters most is strong software engineering judgment, clean technical communication, and the ability to evaluate code, architecture, tradeoffs, and implementation quality.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Work on challenging software engineering tasks across backend, full-stack, infrastructure, and systems-related projects.
2. Review, debug, improve, and explain code across different technical environments.
3. Design or evaluate practical solutions involving APIs, databases, services, integrations, testing, and deployment workflows.
4. Identify tradeoffs around scalability, maintainability, performance, reliability, security, and developer experience.
5. Communicate technical reasoning clearly in writing, including why a solution works and what alternatives were considered.
6. Collaborate with the customer’s team on technical reviews, implementation decisions, and problem-solving exercises.
7. Adapt quickly to new codebases, frameworks, and technical requirements.

Required Skills and Qualifications:

1. 3+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.
2. Strong experience in at least one backend or full-stack engineering environment, such as Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, Java, C++, Go or Ruby
3. Experience building, maintaining, or reviewing production-level applications, APIs, services, databases, or integrations.
4. Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including debugging, testing, code quality, architecture, and technical tradeoffs.
5. Ability to explain complex engineering decisions clearly and objectively.
6. Comfortable reading and reasoning through unfamiliar code or technical requirements

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Experience with cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
2. Experience with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps workflows, containers, monitoring, or production operations.
3. Experience with frontend frameworks such as React, Next.js, Angular, Vue, or React Native.
4. Open-source contributions, public GitHub work, technical writing, or strong examples of past engineering work.
5. Experience mentoring engineers, reviewing code, or making architecture decisions.