One of our clients is indeed using a traditional "data labeling" site to organize work, but the tasks are long-running, 10-50 hour blocks. They require strong software engineers with good taste to code using frontier models in their own IDEs or terminals. Also, when evaluating new team members, we prefer paying people to do some work, rather than endless unpaid interviewing, and this is a great first project. We've been paying $70-$110/hr for these initial engagements (depending on tier) -- this is NOT your grand-daddy's Amazon Mechanical Turk.

It sounds like we can do a better job explaining all this during the phone screen, and I apologize if it sounded like we weren't hiring software engineers for serious technical work.