Backend Engineer (Rust)

TalentCo are delighted to be working with a fast-growing deep-tech startup in the Physical AI space, looking to hire 2-3 high-calibre Rust Backend Engineers (Distributed Systems & Scaling) into their growing engineering team across Europe.

This hire can be based fully remote anywhere in Europe, for this remote-first, European-headquartered startup.

You will be at the forefront of building a purpose-built analytical database for the huge volumes of temporal, multimodal data produced by robots and sensors. The product is already running at petabyte scale with early customers, and the team is now building out the core: data model, query engine, ingestion, indexing and storage. There is a huge amount still to design and build, and you will help shape the architecture rather than execute someone else's plan.

This role requires strong backend engineering skills, a real understanding of distributed systems, and the ability to evolve an architecture as load grows. You'll work in a small, senior, high-agency team where engineers own what they build.

As Rust Backend Engineer you will:

• Design and evolve distributed systems that scale as product usage grows, distributing data and requests across more nodes and services.
• Help build and scale the core of a columnar analytical database, including ingestion, indexing, storage and query paths.
• Identify and resolve the bottlenecks and failure modes that appear at scale.
• Write production-grade Rust in a modern stack built around columnar data and object storage.
• Take broad ownership of what you build, from early design through to production.

We want to hear from you if you have:

• 3-5 years of professional experience building and scaling backend systems, ideally in managed database products, SaaS or data-platform companies, or high-traffic environments.
• A concrete story of re-architecting a system to handle a big jump in load or data volume (for example, distributing work across nodes).
• Production Rust experience, or a strong systems background (C/C++) with genuine motivation to work in Rust.
• A solid understanding of distributed systems trade-offs: coordination, consistency, failure modes, retries and scaling across nodes.
• Comfort with lower-level systems work and some familiarity with database internals.
• Nice to have: Apache Arrow / DataFusion, cloud deployment (AWS/GCP/Azure) and/or an interest in ML, robotics, AR/VR or simulation.

What do they offer?

• Salary up to €95k
• Meaningful early-stage equity
• Remote-first working, with quarterly in-person team meetups
• Six weeks' paid vacation
• Pension and healthcare package aligned to your country of residence
• Whatever hardware and software you need to do your job