Rust Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data & Infrastructure

About the Role

What if your expertise in Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a senior-level Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance distributed systems, data pipelines, and evaluation tooling that leading AI labs depend on every day.

This is a fully remote contract role with flexible hours and meaningful, high-impact work from day one.

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

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and optimize high-performance systems in Rust supporting production AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop full-stack backend tooling and 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 distributed system behavior and implement scalable, production-grade fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

Who You Are

• Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
• 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust
• Strong background in building distributed services using RPC frameworks with experience handling distributed state or consensus
• Experienced at debugging complex concurrency issues — deadlocks, race conditions — using async instrumentation and tracing tools
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliable availability

Nice to Have

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

Why Join Us

• Work directly with leading AI research labs on real production systems — not toy projects
• Fully remote and asynchronous-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinking
• Freelance autonomy with the structure of consistent, high-value technical work
• Tackle genuinely hard engineering problems at the frontier of AI infrastructure
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale