Stellar AI

Company Profile

What Stellar AI Is

Stellar AI closed permanently. The company announced the shutdown on October 10, 2026 and sent closure emails to workers through the rest of that month. There is no work and no application. This page is kept as a record of how the platform ran.

Stellar AI (joinstellar.ai) was a remote AI training and data annotation platform offering flexible, project-based work. Like DataAnnotation and Outlier, it supplied human feedback, RLHF, and domain expertise to train large language models. The platform was designed for self-service, letting independent contractors pick up tasks whenever they had free time, provided projects were available.

The work spanned generalist data annotation and creative writing through to specialized software engineering and machine learning model evaluation. Annotators had open-ended contracts with no fixed schedule or set duration. Availability thinned badly after June 2026 and never recovered.

How Stellar AI Pays

The rates below are a record of what Stellar AI paid while it was open. The platform closed in October 2026.

Stellar AI paid an hourly rate, with compensation scaled to the technical complexity of the project. Unlike per-task platforms, Stellar ran heavily on an hourly model and had a reputation for paying competitively, on time, every week.

For specialized technical roles such as Senior Software Engineers and ML Engineers, Stellar AI offered Guaranteed Hours Contracts, which gave a degree of income predictability generalist contractors never got.

*Rates based on platform listings and community self-reports. Your actual rate is tied directly to the specific project or the tier you qualify for and is not negotiable.

Getting In: Qualification & Tests

Applications are closed. Stellar AI shut down in October 2026, so none of the steps below are open to anyone. They are kept because the bar Stellar set is a useful comparison when you are sizing up a platform that is still running.

1. Apply online (closed) — You registered on the Stellar AI website and picked the role that matched your background. The site no longer takes applications.
2. Complete the skill match test — An initial assessment designed to evaluate your reasoning, attention to detail, or technical skills depending on the track you applied for.
3. Enter the waiting pool — Passing the assessment does not guarantee immediate work. You enter an annotator pool and wait for client demand to align with your specific skills.
4. Onboarding — When a suitable project opens up, you are onboarded to that specific project and provided with comprehensive, self-service training materials and guidelines.

How It Ended

Stellar AI scaled through late 2025 and early 2026, hit the classic growing pains of the AI gig economy, and then closed.

• The platform closed for good in October 2026 — Stellar AI posted its permanent closure on October 10, 2026. A subset of workers got a targeted goodbye email that hinted at a future opportunity; most got nothing. Workers who had been there for years described it as losing the one decent platform in the space while the worse ones carried on.
• Work dried up months before the announcement — Several long-term workers report solid availability from roughly December 2025 through June 2026, then a collapse. Through the late summer the platform was still running qualification tests for projects that never arrived, which kept people hoping for nothing.
• The Empty Queue hit hard — Around February 2026, many workers experienced a massive drop-off in task availability. Projects were suddenly paused without warning as client batches ended, leaving even high-rated annotators with nothing to work on.
• Support bottlenecks — During EQ periods, workers reported a significant lack of communication from support. Highly rated annotators often found themselves without any timeframe for when projects would return.
• Shift to Guaranteed Hours Contracts — For highly specialized technical roles (Senior Software Engineers and ML Engineers), Stellar AI began offering specific "Guaranteed Hours Contracts" to lock in top talent — a departure from the purely open-ended, log-in-whenever model offered to generalists.

Frequently Asked Questions