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Competitive Data Scientist

$60–$120/h

Global, fully remote

Role overview

Role Title: Competitive Data Scientist

Pay: $60–$120/hour

Location: Global, fully remote

Job Type: Contractor (~15 hours per week)

Schedule: Flexible-you choose the hours and days you work, including weekends if desired


We're looking for data scientists, machine learning practitioners, and applied mathematics experts with competitve Data Science experience. (Kaggle, DrivenData, etc.)


You’ll draw on your competition experience, mathematical reasoning, and programming skills to create tasks that require more than a plausible answer. Each task should have a reproducible environment, a verified reference solution, and reliable checks for successful completion.


What You’ll Do

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

What We’re Looking For

  1. Demonstrated experience in data science, ML, quantitative modeling, or relevant research competitions. (Kaggle, DrivenData, etc.)
  2. Strong problem-solving ability and a clear understanding of the methods you use.
  3. 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

  1. Strong coding experience, particularly in Python, including testing, debugging, and working with unfamiliar code

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Future of work · September 2026

How big is the remote / hybrid opportunity?

Remote work is already huge — but the bigger story may be the hundreds of millions of jobs that could still move beyond geography.

Sporterer Insights · Approximate figures based on World Bank and ILO estimates
Global remote and hybrid work opportunity infographic

Remote work already connects millions of people with companies they would never have been able to work for a decade ago. But compared with the size of the global labour market, it may still be early.

The interesting number is not only how many people work remotely today — it is how many roles could plausibly become remote or hybrid next.

The chart above starts with roughly 3.3 billion people employed worldwide. Around 300 million jobs are already remote or hybrid, while an additional pool of roughly 250 million roles could potentially move in that direction as technology, workflows and company culture continue to change.

Skills are becoming more portable

This matters because more work can increasingly be matched to expertise rather than location. AI training and evaluation are a good example: companies need lawyers, engineers, designers, editors, researchers, finance professionals and many other specialists to help improve AI systems.

For workers, that creates access to projects outside their local market. For companies, it expands the talent pool from one city or country to the world.

Explore remote opportunities →