Systems Programmer - AI Data Pipelines

Systems Programmer — AI Data Pipelines

About the Role

What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a Senior Rust Full-Stack Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that leading AI labs depend on every day.

This isn't prototype work or toy projects. You'll be writing production Rust that processes real data at scale — collaborating with research and engineering teams at the frontier of AI development.

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

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and optimize high-performance Rust systems supporting 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 data and system behavior, then implement scalable fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on system 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
• Deep command of Rust lifetimes, ownership mechanics, and idiomatic error handling patterns
• Experienced building I/O-bound data pipelines with robust retry/backoff logic for production environments
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently
• Self-directed and reliable when working remotely across distributed teams

Nice to Have

• Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines
• Experience with distributed systems architecture or developer tooling
• Background in systems programming beyond Rust — C, C++, or similar

Why Join Us

• Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs
• Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best work
• Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-impact engineering work
• Contribute to infrastructure that directly influences how next-generation AI models are built and evaluated
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale