A Day in the Life of an Appen Contributor: Iker Llamas Cantalapiedra

As a producer of training data, our competitive advantage is our ability to make high-quality training data. But, we can only do that because of our Appen Contributors. Our crowd of contributors is made up of over 1 million people across the globe speaking over 180 different languages. We pair these contributors with machine learning assistance to efficiently and accurately label data.

What Our Appen Contributors Are Working On

Training data sets are created by collecting, sorting, preparing, and labeling individual pieces of data. Each data point must be accurately annotated, which can mean placing a bounding box around the correct object in an image or accurately translating or transcribing a word. Each Appen project is slightly different.

While each job is slightly different, what doesn’t change is that our contributors can work flexible hours and receive fair pay for their time. We were named a #1 company with remote jobs by FlexJobs, which is something we’re incredibly proud of.

As critical members of the Appen team, we’ve decided to highlight individual contributors and celebrate their accomplishments with our audiences. This series of posts features one contributor per post and shares their experience working with Appen. You can find past posts, on our blog.

Meet: Iker Llamas Cantalapiedra

Our featured contributor this time is Iker Llamas Cantalapiedra, from Spain. Iker joined the Appen contributor team after traveling abroad and studying English for four months. With a background in computer science, working as a data annotator for Appen was a natural choice for Iker.

In addition to his work for Appen, Iker works as a receptionist and cleaner at a sports club. In his spare time, Iker likes to spend time in nature and at the beach. He also enjoys traveling.

What Appen Projects Iker is Working On

When candidates apply to work as a contributor at Appen, they get to choose which projects to work on. There are always a number of different projects going on, which gives applicants and contributors the ability to choose what works for them and their interests.

Iker spent the last two years working on our Shasta project providing relevance and accuracy ratings for mapping applications. “I like to work on the Shasta project because I find a lot of beautiful places, I have a lot of those saved to visit if I make a trip in the future and it helps me to improve my English too,” says Iker. In addition to the Shasta project, Iker also works on Appen’s Popple project.

Why Work for Appen?

For many Appen contributors, they choose to work with Appen for the flexibility. “My favourite part of this job is that in most projects I can work at the time that best suits me,” says Iker. “I love that usually I work at night, this is my favourite time, after finishing all my other tasks.”

The flexibility to work when it’s most convenient for the contributors, is what brings a lot of people to work with us. But, that’s not the only reason. Iker goes on to say, “I had always thought that from home I could only find small jobs in which you could only get a little money, but Appen has shown me that there are also jobs where you can dedicate more hours and get a salary or extra money.”

We pride ourselves on providing our contributors with flexibility and fair pay.

How You Can Become and Appen Contributor

Looking for flexible work hours and fair pay? You can become an Appen contributor, just like Iker. To get started, visit our jobs page and follow these simple steps.

  1. Select a project that interests you and read the instructions.
  2. Apply to work on the task.
  3. Start tasking! We track your task accuracy. A high accuracy rate means you can level up on work on more projects.

The best part about working for Appen as a contributor is that you get to set your own hours, work when you can, and for as long as you want. If your work gets interrupted, that’s ok, come back anytime to finish.

If you’re interested in applying to work on the Shasta project or other Appen contributor projects, get started here.

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