Toloka

Toloka is an AI data company founded in 2014 by Olga Megorskaya. It is headquartered in Amsterdam and operates through Toloka AI BV, with teams in several other countries. The company helps organizations create and evaluate the data used to develop AI systems, including language and multimodal models. “Multimodal” simply means a model that can work with more than one kind of content, such as text, images, audio or video. Toloka’s official company page gives its founding year, leadership, locations and current focus.

If you remember Toloka as a microtask website for individual annotators, there has been an important change. Toloka remains the company and customer-facing AI data brand, but its current contributor opportunities have been consolidated under Mindrift.

AI data training work at Toloka

Toloka’s services include collecting data, annotating it, checking model outputs and building evaluation sets. Projects can cover text quality, search relevance, coding, reasoning, image and video understanding, speech and AI safety. The people doing this work can include general contributors as well as linguists, writers, software developers and experts in subjects such as science, law, medicine or finance.

Toloka no longer presents a separate new Annotators application route. Toloka’s official contributor transition page directs contributors to Mindrift and says Toloka tasks have moved there.

What is it like to work at Toloka?

For current contributor work, the practical conditions are Mindrift’s. You participate as an independent contributor rather than an employee, work remotely and decide whether to take an offered assignment. Eligibility can be restricted by country, language, professional background or project requirements.

Approval does not guarantee continuous work. Depending on your qualifications, you may see open-access tasks, tasks that require a short qualification or invitations to specialist projects. Client demand changes, so there can be busy periods and gaps with no suitable assignments. Project length and expected hours are set per opportunity rather than through one standard schedule.

The transition guidance says the payment approach remains the same: the price is provided for the task, and you are paid for completed work that is accepted after review. Payments are processed twice monthly under the current contributor platform. The project page provides its current rate, review criteria and deadline. Confidential assignments may also require extra terms or a non-disclosure agreement.

Application process at Toloka

You apply to a relevant opportunity on Mindrift, submit a CV or résumé and provide information about your languages and specialist experience. Screening may include a writing, language or subject-matter assessment, and some roles add an interview. Identity verification can be required before paid access is enabled.

Mindrift’s current application guide explains that passing the initial checks may place you in its talent pool. If a suitable project is available, you then receive project instructions and may need to complete a further qualification or onboarding task. Paid task access begins with an actual project invitation; general acceptance alone does not promise work. If you had an older Toloka account and need help with the migration or a balance, use Toloka support instead of creating duplicate accounts.

For current application details, available jobs and Thriveth member experiences, continue to the Mindrift company profile.

Sources: Company website

Information last updated August 2026.