AI Writer Jobs: Staff Roles, Training Tasks and the Tests

AI writer jobs split into two kinds: staff writing roles at AI companies, and training tasks where writers grade and rewrite a model’s output. On 8 November 2026, the AI vendor boards we read carried 10 staff writing roles and 2 training postings, while 10 of the getAIwork board’s 19 writing titled listings were training tasks.

On this page: writing postings read on 28 AI companies’ own job boards on 8 November 2026 with pay as printed, the 19 writing titled listings counted on the getAIwork board and sorted by what the work is, and the writing tests each kind asks for.

What counts as an AI writer job in real postings?

Two quite different jobs answer to the same search. The first is an ordinary writing job that happens to be at an AI company: a copywriter, an editor or a content designer, salaried, with a portfolio review and an interview loop. The second is AI training work, where the writer is not writing for readers at all. They write, score and repair text so a model learns what good writing looks like.

The pages that rank for this query mostly pour both into one salary average, which describes nobody, rather like averaging a novelist and a proofreading app. So below, each kind is counted on its own, from postings read on 8 November 2026, with the pay exactly as each posting printed it. A printed range is not an offer, rates change, and nothing on this page is a promise of work.

Which AI companies are hiring writers on their own job boards?

We read the public job boards of 28 AI companies by script on 8 November 2026, from OpenAI and Anthropic to smaller labs and tool makers. Most were hiring engineers and sales staff. Ten postings were writing roles in the staff sense, and every one that printed pay was based in San Francisco or New York.

Two things stand out. These are senior jobs: the lowest experience bar printed on the list is three years, and most ask for five to eight. And the company called Writer, an AI writing platform, had 48 postings on its own board that day with not one writer, editor or content title among them. Make of that what you will; we made a note of it.

For comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay of all US writers and authors at $76,910 a year in May 2025, counts 140,300 such jobs, says 65 percent of them are self employed, and projects little or no change from 2025 to 2035. That is the whole trade, not AI work, and a median is not a forecast for any one writer.

How many AI writer jobs are on the getAIwork board?

We crawled every page of the getAIwork board on 8 November 2026. It held 1,961 live listings, the same total as its stats.json file updated on 7 November 2026. The board’s screening tags 550 of them as Writing, but that tag is broad: it covers any listing where written judgement is the core skill, including expert evaluation work for lawyers and engineers. Only 19 listings had a writing job in the title, and we sorted those by hand by what the work actually is.

Two of the training listings are worth reading closely, because their titles hide what they are. Synthires listed an Academic Writer and a Legal Writer at $90 to $140 an hour as listed, and both descriptions say the job is evaluating AI generated content, not writing papers or briefs. Mercor’s three engineering writer listings ask for senior engineers who can turn real design problems into evaluation tasks, with a 40 hour week. In this market, writer often means expert who writes.

One limit on our own data: the board has screened 49,412 listings since it began and publishes only the ones that passed, not the ones it rejected or why, so this count says what was live on the day and nothing more. For readers in India, the honest number is small: 12 of the 550 Writing tagged listings were based in India, and none of the 19 writing titled ones were.

If you are not sure which kind suits you, the AI trainer match quiz asks a few questions about your background and points you at the right part of the board.

What writing tests do these jobs ask for?

Staff roles test the way publishing always has: a portfolio and a stack of samples. Harvey’s two roles both ask for a portfolio and eight or more years. Perplexity’s Senior Editor wants a body of published or edited work. Lovable asks applicants to send writing samples in English with the application and says the technical writer should test what they document. No posting we read asked for an AI writing certificate, which will disappoint the people selling them more than the people hiring.

Training postings test harder and earlier. xAI’s AI Tutor, Writing posting, now published under the SpaceXSI name, lists $35 to $75 an hour for US candidates as listed on 8 November 2026, for a six month temporary role, remote only in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. It asks for C2 English and verifiable proof of one specialty: for fiction, at least two of a Big Five publishing deal, novel sales over 50,000 copies, ten stories in major outlets or a major award; for technical writing, five or more years and a public portfolio.

Cohere’s German Writer and Translator posting, listed at CA$30 an hour on 8 November 2026 for remote work within Canada, describes its process plainly: a review of your resume and writing samples, then a virtual annotation test that includes a writing sample and chatting with a bot. The pattern holds across both kinds. Staff jobs judge what you have already written. Training jobs make you write in front of them.

What do writers who tried AI training work report?

We read four public threads, dated between March and October 2026, and 52 of the replies under them. These are reports from forum users, labelled as such, not evidence of how any company hires or pays.

In a March 2026 r/xAI_community thread, an applicant for a model behaviour tutor role described the writing assessment as an essay typed into a split screen test environment, with no clear instruction on which box took the answer; a second applicant had the same confusion. The poster said a second assessment followed the next day and a rejection about two weeks later.

In an October 2026 thread on the same forum, a newly hired tutor said they had been told during recruiting the hours were flexible, then found their onboarding set a fixed 9:00 to 5:30 Pacific day. Replies said US internal hires keep set hours while some international contractors log a weekly minimum instead. Check the contract, not the recruiter’s summary.

In an April 2026 r/DataAnnotationTech thread, several workers said they enjoyed the creative writing tasks but got no feedback on whether their writing passed, and one said the automated checker was hard on poetry. One reply came from a writer with 20 years of paid copywriting who had taken the writing qualifications and still was not being offered those tasks.

And in an October 2026 r/copywriting thread on writers losing work to AI, replies split. Some described being laid off or moved from salary to per deliverable contracts; others said AI drafts at their agencies still needed a skilled writer to fix them. Read together, the accounts agree with the postings: training work is gated by tests and offers little feedback, and staff writing work rewards a portfolio that a model cannot fake.

Which kind of AI writer job fits your schedule?

It depends on how many hours you can give and what you have already published. This comparison uses only the postings above.

For the training side in more depth, our guide to AI trainer jobs and how the platforms organise them covers every platform, the RLHF jobs explainer shows what rating and rewriting model answers involves, and the part time AI jobs comparison sets out the hours each kind of work asks for.

If you are weighing a staff writing job against training tasks, the AI jobs match quiz gives you a shortlist, and the board itself is free to browse with no signup.

Frequently asked questions

Platform statuses and listed pay change without notice. Pay figures are quoted only as listed by the poster on the date shown and are never a promise of earnings. This page was verified on the date shown and is rechecked on the weekly refresh.