Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform

Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) — AI Platform

About the Role

What if your mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a Lead Systems Engineer to design and build high-performance systems at the heart of real AI production workflows — data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure used by leading AI labs.

This is a fully remote contract role for a senior Rust engineer who thrives on hard problems, cares deeply about correctness and performance, and wants their work to matter at scale.

• Organization: Alignerr
• Type: Hourly Contract
• Location: Remote
• Commitment: 20–40 hours/week

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and optimize high-performance Rust systems that power AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control
• Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing Rust codebases
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
• Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in system and data behavior — and implement scalable, lasting fixes
• Lead synchronous design reviews, driving architecture decisions and implementation quality

Who You Are

• Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
• 5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust, with a strong focus on system architecture and API design
• Deep expertise in FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and unsafe Rust boundaries for cross-language optimization
• Advanced command of asynchronous runtimes and thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments
• Comfortable leading system design reviews and making high-stakes architectural decisions
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliability and focus

Nice to Have

• Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or AI evaluation systems
• Familiarity with ML workflows, model training pipelines, or benchmarking infrastructure
• Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling

Why Join Us

• Work on real production systems alongside top AI research labs — not toy projects
• Fully remote and async-friendly — work where and when you do your best thinking
• Meaningful, high-leverage engineering work at the frontier of AI infrastructure
• Freelance autonomy with consistent, structured work and real technical depth
• Potential for ongoing engagement and expanded scope as projects grow