$70-$200/hr backend engineering work, on your schedule
Review AI services and APIs for the race condition, the N+1, the design that won't survive scale. The judgment that keeps systems up under real traffic. Paid hourly, remote, a few hours a week.
Trusted by top research companies
Hi, we're Zac and Jack, the founders of Terac. We want to talk to you directly, because you are the most important part of what we're building.
Terac is a community of experts. People who have spent years getting good at something specific and hard. The world is about to need more of you, not less. As AI takes on more of the world's work, the bottleneck shifts to the people who actually know what they're talking about.
Expert labor is the rarest resource in the world right now, and it is shockingly hard to find. The companies that need a backend engineer's eye on a race condition under load spend weeks chasing people, paying placement fees, and settling for whoever is available. Meanwhile thousands of qualified people are sitting with knowledge that no one ever asks for.
That gap is what we're here to close. Every project that lands on Terac is routed to the people who actually know the answer, on their schedule, paid fairly, and only when the work is verified. No middleman taking a cut of your time. No vague gigs. No chasing checks.
We care about every single person in this community. If you join Terac, you're not a row in a database to us. We read the feedback. We answer the emails. We will fight for you when a customer is being unreasonable, and we will be honest with you when something on our side is broken. The quality of this panel is our entire company, and we owe you a serious bar.
If you've made it this far, here is what we're asking: claim your profile. Put your expertise on the record. Let the world's most ambitious teams come find you for the work only you can do.
Backend Engineering questions
Still curious? Write to us at support@terac.com.
Distributed systems, message brokers like Kafka or RabbitMQ, and consensus protocols are among the most requested profiles, because models struggle most with those tradeoffs. You will evaluate designs for partition tolerance, backpressure, and idempotency, exactly where generalist answers fall short. Narrow depth is an asset.
You will not touch proprietary client systems or live infrastructure. The code, diagrams, and configs are synthetic or sanitized scenarios built for training, so there is no risk of advising on a real environment. Your job is to assess AI output, not to certify any actual system.
Certs like CKA, CKAD, or AWS Solutions Architect are useful signals but not required. What qualifies you is the ability to reason about orchestration, cloud networking, database internals, and API design. For deep Kubernetes tasks, cert holders are prioritized, but equivalent experience carries the same weight.
It varies, but common formats are REST and gRPC designs, SQL and NoSQL schemas, system design write-ups on scalability and fault tolerance, and code in Go, Python, Java, or Rust. Some tasks ask you to rank two implementations and explain the tradeoff; others ask you to write the expert solution yourself. You see the format before committing.
Data engineering sits squarely within backend on Terac, and pipeline work is actively needed since models are often evaluated on data infrastructure. Batch and streaming design, orchestration with Airflow or Prefect, and transformation layers in dbt or Spark all qualify. Indicate your sub-specialties during onboarding so the right tasks route to you.
Why your expertise matters
A model proposes an index strategy, a connection pool config, or an async worker that looks right and silently breaks a consistency guarantee, introduces an N+1, or misuses transaction isolation in ways that only surface at scale. Spotting that takes a backend engineer who has run services under real load. Your corrections teach the model what production-safe actually means.
How pay works
Top of the $70-$200 band goes to depth in distributed systems, database internals, or high-throughput messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS), and to engineers who name precise failure modes. Work is remote, billed hourly, paid on verified completion. No fixed shifts, no minimum hours.
What the work looks like
A sample of the backend engineering work you would pick up. Every project is scoped, remote, and paid on verified completion.
- Review a machine-written PostgreSQL migration that adds a foreign key to a high-write table and judge whether the lock behavior causes downtime.
- Evaluate a model's async worker for Stripe webhooks and check whether idempotency and retry logic are correct.
- Score three AI REST designs for a pagination endpoint and rank cursor-based versus offset approaches on large result sets.
- Write a worked example of diagnosing connection pool exhaustion in a Node.js service backed by PostgreSQL.
- Review a model's Kubernetes deployment manifest for a stateless API and flag bad liveness probes, resource limits, or missing graceful shutdown.
- Assess a model's Redis caching layer for a session service and judge whether the invalidation strategy matches the write patterns.
Specialties we match
Backend Engineering projects span a wide range of focus areas. Tell us where you go deep and we route the work that fits.
- PostgreSQL / query optimization
- Redis caching patterns
- Kafka and event streaming
- REST and gRPC API design
- Database schema design and migrations
- Distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry)
- Container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)
- Background job queues (Celery, Sidekiq, BullMQ)
- Authentication and OAuth 2.0 flows
- Rate limiting and backpressure
- Observability and structured logging
- Database transaction isolation
