Bellingcat is Hiring - Contractor: AI Engineer (Open Source Agentic Systems)

Full-time or part-time contractor engagement, 40 or 20 hours per week, initially for 12 months.

Location: We support flexible ways of working, primarily through working from home. In line with our international remote working policy, employees may also be eligible to work from another country for a limited number of weeks each year.

Preferred start date: as soon as possible, subject to mutual agreement and completion of the hiring process.

About Bellingcat

Bellingcat is an independent collective of international researchers investigating conflict, corruption, crimes, disinformation, extremist networks, and much more through open source and social media techniques. Our work has received multiple awards for its impact and innovation. At the heart of Bellingcat is a global community of staff, contributors, and volunteers working across disciplines — from journalism and research to technology.

About the Role

We are looking for a Contract AI Software Engineer to help us build agentic systems for open-source researchers and journalists. In this project-based role, you support Bellingcat’s Innovation Unit to design, deploy and refine AI agents and agentic workflows powered by open-source AI models. 

You should be based in a timezone with sufficient overlap in working hours to collaborate effectively with Europe-based team members. 

Key Responsibilities

  • Build, test,deploy, and monitor multi-agent workflows for the field of open source investigations.
  • Develop agentic pipelines that prioritize human control and safety through human feedback loops, evaluation metrics, and agile experimentation in close collaboration with Bellingcat’s Innovation Unit.
  • Architect and maintain cloud infrastructure for hosting LLM harnesses, coordinating agent activity, and monitoring agent behavior, using token-as-a-service providers for LLM models.
  • Develop MCP servers and data bridges to connect agents to external open source research tools and databases. 
  • Create evaluation frameworks to measure the deterministic performance and reasoning capabilities of our open-source agentic pipelines.

What we are looking for

  • Hands-on full-stack development experience, including maintaining infrastructure, developing server-side data workflows and creating front-end interfaces for a variety of users.
  • Experience with agentic AI workflows and open-source harnesses.
  • Experience with human-in-the-loop design with a strong focus on approval checks and feedback loops.
  • Collaborative mindset and proven track record of partnering with non-technical teammates to co-design (public interest) technology.
  • English proficiency.

Great to have

  • Experience working for or collaborating with mission-driven organisations.
  • Experience building open source or public interest technology.

What we offer

Bellingcat is a fully remote international team. Our distributed model of work encourages collaboration, initiative, a high degree of responsibility and ownership of both your successes and challenges. We value and reward the drive for excellence.

This contractor opportunity can either be done full-time (40 hours per week) or part-time (20 hours per week). The initial contract is for 12 months. The annual fee for the full-time contract is between 80 000 and 93 000 USD depending on experience and track record. 

How to apply

Please apply using this form. Applications close on November 8, but candidates will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting October 21. Interviews may begin before the application window closes.

A note on AI use: Please do not send us AI-generated applications. We filter them out if we spot them. It is ok to refine your text to check grammar or vocabulary errors but do not send us AI generated motivation letters or ideas. Your application does not need to be perfect, we would like to get to know you, your experiences, perspectives and ideas. AI tools write very similar motivation letters and provide very similar ideas to everyone, we do not want to read the same text paragraphs dozens of times.