Global vendors hiring for remote & digital work

Handshake describes itself as 'the career network for the AI economy' — a three-sided marketplace connecting 25 million knowledge workers, 1,600+ educational institutions, and 1 million employers, founded in 2014 by Garrett Lord, Ben Christensen, and Scott Ringwelski (originally Michigan Tech computer science students). The Handshake AI Fellowship is Handshake's paid, remote AI-training and AI-evaluation program: fellows apply professional or academic expertise to create training content and evaluate AI-generated responses for accuracy and quality, working with what the company describes as 'leading AI research labs.' The Fellowship states it has made over $100M in payouts to over 100,000 fellows to date. No AI experience is required for entry-level roles; more specialized roles target professionals and graduate-level experts across specific domains (e.g. chemistry, philosophy, software development).

TELUS Digital (rebranded from TELUS International in 2024) is the customer experience and digital solutions arm of TELUS, the Canadian telecommunications company. It traces its roots to TELUS's 2005–2006 investment in Ambergris Solutions, a Philippines-based BPO, and has grown into a global operation spanning contact center outsourcing, AI data services, digital solutions and trust & safety work, serving over 600 client brands worldwide. Its AI division — TELUS Digital AI, run through the 'AI Community' program — is the part most relevant to remote freelancers: a crowdsourced network the company describes as having over 1 million contributors worldwide who collect, label, translate, and evaluate the data used to train and improve AI models for major technology companies. Roles range from short, no-experience-required data-labeling and ad-relevance-rating tasks up to PhD-level domain expert work in fields like law, medicine, architecture, and the physical sciences. All AI Community work is engaged on a freelance/contractor basis rather than as direct employment, with pay, hours, and project length varying significantly by role. TELUS Digital's traditional (non-AI-Community) careers site also lists conventional employee positions in customer service, trust & safety, and digital delivery roles across the company's 33-country operating footprint.

OneForma is a crowdsourced platform connecting contributors worldwide with data-annotation and AI-training projects — reviewing AI outputs, transcribing and annotating audio, collecting data, translating, and authoring LLM prompts. Contributors join as independent contributors (not employees), get certified through OneForma's own GenAI certification process, and are matched to projects based on their validated skills and language. Pay is calculated per hour or per approved unit of work, with the exact rate varying by project, language, and locale — OneForma does not publish a single company-wide pay rate; rates are shown only after selecting your specific project and locale.

Welocalize was founded in 1997 and is headquartered at 136 Madison Avenue, New York. It has grown into 'Welo Global', a holding company operating five distinct brands: Welocalize (core translation/localization services), Adapt (international digital marketing), Park IP (intellectual property translation for patents and legal filings), Welo Life Sciences (regulated medical/pharmaceutical/clinical translation), and Welo Data (AI training data and annotation services). The company states it operates across 300+ languages, serving 2,000+ clients with 1,500+ corporate employees, built on its proprietary 'Opal' AI/machine-translation platform. For TTA Academy's audience specifically, the freelance, no-degree AI-annotation and data-rating work is run under the Welo Data brand — Welocalize's own general job board (jobs.lever.co/weloglobal, 'Welocalize' department) is dominated by full-time and on-site/hybrid linguist and localization-QA employment roles in specific countries, not open freelance work.

DataForce is TransPerfect's AI data-services platform, connecting companies with a global network the company describes as 'over 1 million data contributors, scientists, and engineers' (and elsewhere 'over 1.3 million people worldwide') for AI/machine-learning training data work. TransPerfect itself was founded in 1992 — starting, per its own official history, as 'a two-person company operating out of a dorm room' — and has grown into a global language-and-technology-services company with 160+ offices and 10,000+ clients, headquartered in New York. DataForce's own services span four main categories: Data Sourcing (photo/video/audio collection), Data Annotation (image, video, text/NLP, and audio annotation), User Studies (product testing and UX feedback), and direct Job Opportunities (freelance, part-time and full-time, both remote and on-site). Work is organized as individual projects/studies posted to DataForce's own community portal, each with its own specific requirements, device needs, and pay rate — there is no single company-wide pay rate.

CrowdGen by Appen is the contributor platform of Appen Limited (ASX: APX), a publicly traded AI-data company founded in 1996 in Sydney, Australia, that describes '30 years at the intersection of human intelligence and AI' across speech recognition, machine translation, computer vision, RLHF alignment, and frontier model development, with '80% of the world's leading LLM builders' among its customers. CrowdGen (previously branded Appen Connect — existing users sign in with the same credentials) is where individual contributors register, get matched to projects, complete tasks, and get paid. The platform states it operates in 'over 200 countries' and paid contributors 'over $157 million' in 2022.