About the Role
What if your deep expertise in Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering some of the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to design and build the high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure that leading AI labs depend on to train and refine next-generation models.
This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for a seasoned Rust engineer who thrives on hard systems problems 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 model evaluation workflows
- Develop full-stack backend tooling and services for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control
- Improve reliability, performance, and safety across production Rust codebases
- Collaborate closely with data, research, and engineering teams to accelerate model training and evaluation
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks and edge cases in data flow and system behavior
- 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
- 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust for data-intensive applications
- Deep understanding of memory management and zero-copy deserialization with minimal runtime overhead
- Proven experience integrating Rust with machine learning frameworks or columnar data standards to support model training workflows
- Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with consistency and reliability
- Self-directed and comfortable operating in fast-moving, research-adjacent environments
Nice to Have
- Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or model evaluation systems
- Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training pipelines, or benchmarking infrastructure
- Experience building distributed systems or developer tooling at scale
Why Join Us
- Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs
- Fully remote and async-friendly — work when and where it suits you
- Freelance autonomy paired with high-impact, technically demanding work
- Contribute directly to the infrastructure that makes next-generation AI possible
- Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch