Why micro1 Lists More Expert AI Jobs Than Anyone Else

2026-09-08 · Expert Match AI team

Every AI training platform we track has a personality. Surge is four roles and a velvet rope. Mercor is specialist talent networks. Braintrust is senior engineering. And micro1 is, by a wide margin, the board.

As of the September 7 snapshot, micro1 lists 150 of the 330 live roles we track across 10 platforms, and 145 of the 236 with a disclosed hourly rate - 61% of every priced listing in the market. The next-largest priced boards are Alignerr at 29 and Braintrust at 24. If you applied to every micro1 role and nothing else, you would have covered most of the visible AI training market.

This post is about what is actually on that board, because "biggest" turns out to hide a lot.

The rate spread is the whole story

micro1's average rate is $88/hr, up from $65 at the end of July. That number is almost meaningless on its own, because micro1's listings run from $6/hr to $400/hr - a 67x spread within a single platform, wider than the gap between the highest- and lowest-paying platforms we track.

Here is where the 145 priced roles actually sit:

| Rate band (midpoint) | Roles | Share | |---|---|---| | Under $20/hr | 11 | 8% | | $20–50/hr | 35 | 24% | | $50–100/hr | 48 | 33% | | $100–200/hr | 37 | 26% | | $200/hr and up | 14 | 10% |

A third of the board is mid-band expert work at $50–100. Another third pays $100 or more. And a third is at or below $50, including a bottom tier that would not survive on any other expert platform. micro1 is not one job board. It is three, sharing a login.

The three boards inside micro1

The credentialed tier ($100–400/hr). This is where micro1's average comes from, and it is new. The attorney set - Corporate, Litigation, M&A, Immigration and Family Law attorneys, several tagged "BigLaw" - lists at $140–400/hr. A "PhD & Academic Expert" role and a Senior Journalist role both list at $245–280. Physics PhDs (statistical physics, quantum information, condensed matter, AMO) list at $100–200, alongside developmental psychology and military/veteran mental-health specialists at the same band. These are the roles that pushed micro1's field averages for legal to $166/hr and science to $134/hr - higher than the board-wide science average.

The professional tier ($50–140/hr). The bulk of the board: software engineers and specialists at a $89/hr field average, product, UX and technical-writing specialists at $90–140, hospitalists and clinical reviewers at $70–100, adolescent mental-health specialists at $45–95, business analysts at $90–140. This is where most applicants with a degree and five years of experience will land, and it is competitive with Braintrust ($105 average) without the seniority bar.

The collection tier ($6–35/hr). Eleven roles at or below $20/hr, almost all of them data collection rather than evaluation: at-home video recorders (US, LATAM, Brazil), smartphone video collectors, a 360° camera role, "data-video generalists." These pay $6–17/hr. They are legitimate - micro1 is collecting multimodal training data - but they are not expert work and they should not be mentally averaged with the attorney tier just because they share a platform.

The linguistics roles straddle the bottom two tiers: 11 "Bilingual Expert" listings (Bengali, Dutch, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese) at $20–65/hr, plus transcription roles like Cantonese at $20–35. That is a very different market from the $40–95 rare-language premium we found in July - we covered the collapse in the language pay post.

micro1 by field

| Field | micro1 roles | micro1 avg | Board-wide avg | |---|---|---|---| | Legal | 21 | $166 | $180 | | Science | 9 | $134 | $109 | | Finance | 6 | $107 | $100 | | Software | 40 | $89 | $97 | | Business | 11 | $76 | $79 | | Healthcare | 7 | $74 | $109 | | ML, Data & AI | 33 | $63 | $54 | | Linguistics | 14 | $43 | $54 |

Two readings. In science and finance, micro1 pays above the market - it is the place to look if you are a physics PhD or a financial analyst. In healthcare, micro1 pays well under the market ($74 vs $109), because its clinical roles are hospitalist-review and mental-health-specialist work, not the $250–450 physician tiers that Surge and Mercor list. A doctor should read the healthcare guide before anchoring on micro1.

Why the breadth exists

micro1 runs an AI-first pipeline: an automated interviewer ("Zara") screens candidates, and the platform sources for a long list of lab clients simultaneously. That model scales the number of open requisitions in a way a human-recruiter model cannot, which is why micro1 can carry 150 roles when Mercor carries 18. It also means listings are cheap to post and cheap to leave open. Several micro1 roles have been on our board since we started tracking on July 2.

The practical consequences:

• All 150 roles are remote, and 138 are open globally ("global unless the listing specifies otherwise"); only 12 are US-only. Every role is tagged as an AI training project - there is no full-time employment on the board.
• Volume is not ease. A listing that has been open for two months is not a listing nobody wants; it is a queue that keeps accepting applicants. Being accepted to the platform and being assigned paid work are different events, and the gap between them is the most common complaint about every high-volume platform. Our first-90-days plan is built around that gap.
• The screening is the job interview. micro1's AI interview does most of the filtering. The assessments post covers what it is grading; the short version is credential strings the machine can match, concrete scope, and no improvising.

How to use micro1 well

Treat it as one leg of a platform stack, not the whole plan. If your background is legal, physics, finance, or senior engineering, micro1 is currently listing the roles that lifted its own average and it belongs at the top of your list. If your background is clinical, apply to micro1 for the volume but anchor on Surge or Mercor for the rate. If you are bilingual with no other credential, the $20–65 language roles are real work with thin competition - just do not expect the July numbers.

And if you are looking at a $6/hr video-recording listing, know what it is: a data-collection gig, priced like one.

Every micro1 role with its current rate is on the micro1 platform page, the salary report recomputes the averages above every 6 hours, and the August pay report puts micro1's month in the context of the whole market. Upload a resume on the homepage to see which of the 150 rank for your background - free, no account, resume never stored.

Published by the Expert Match AI team. Pay figures are listed rates from live postings, not a survey of accepted offers. Expert Match AI is independent and not operated by micro1. Some outbound application links on this site, including micro1's, carry disclosed referral codes; rankings and recommendations are never influenced by them.