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Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform

$50-75/hrRemoteFreelanceCODING

About the Role

What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Senior Rust Full-Stack Engineer to build high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure for leading AI labs — working on systems that matter at scale.

This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who know Rust deeply and want to apply it to genuinely hard, high-impact problems 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 systems in Rust 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, and implement scalable, production-ready fixes
  • Lead synchronous system design reviews and drive key architectural decisions

Who You Are

  • Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
  • 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust, with a strong focus on system architecture and API design
  • Deep expertise in FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and unsafe Rust boundaries to optimize cross-language interactions
  • Advanced command of asynchronous runtimes and thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments
  • Able to lead technical reviews and communicate design tradeoffs clearly to cross-functional teams
  • Available to commit 20–40 hours per week on a consistent basis

Nice to Have

  • Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems
  • Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines
  • Experience building distributed systems or developer tooling
  • Background working with or alongside AI research teams

Why Join Us

  • Work directly on production systems and high-impact infrastructure for leading AI labs
  • Tackle genuinely hard Rust engineering challenges — not toy projects
  • Fully remote and flexible — work on a schedule that fits your life
  • Freelance autonomy combined with meaningful, technically rich work
  • Collaborate with world-class data, research, and engineering teams shaping the future of AI
  • Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch