Rust Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data & Distributed Infrastructure

About The Role

What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a seasoned Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance distributed systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure at scale.

This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who write production Rust, think deeply about distributed systems, and want their work to matter.

• 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 support AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop full-stack backend services and tooling for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control
• Improve reliability, safety, and performance across existing production Rust codebases
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks, edge cases, and systemic issues in distributed data systems
• Participate in synchronous design reviews and iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

Who You Are

• 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust
• Strong background building distributed services using RPC frameworks and managing distributed state or consensus
• Experienced debugging complex concurrency issues — deadlocks, race conditions — using async instrumentation and tracing tools
• Clear, precise written and verbal communicator — you can articulate technical decisions to a mixed audience
• Native or fluent English speaker
• Available and able to commit 20–40 hours per week

Nice to Have

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

Why Join Us

• Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs — not toy projects
• Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinking
• Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-stakes engineering work
• Tackle genuinely hard technical problems at the intersection of systems engineering and AI
• Potential for ongoing engagement and expanded scope as projects evolve