Data Infrastructure Engineer (Rust) - High Performance Computing

About the Role

What if your expertise in Rust could directly shape the infrastructure behind the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Senior Rust Engineer to design and build high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that power cutting-edge AI research and production workflows.

This is a fully remote contract role working alongside leading AI labs on real, high-impact engineering challenges — not toy projects. If you live and breathe Rust and care deeply about performance, safety, and correctness, this is the work you've been waiting for.

• 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 large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for data annotation, validation, and quality control at scale
• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks — squeezing every bit of performance from memory layout, SIMD optimizations, and concurrency patterns
• Improve reliability, correctness, and safety across existing production Rust codebases
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

Who You Are

• 5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust
• Deep expertise in data parallelism and concurrency patterns to maximize CPU saturation
• Mastery of memory layout, SIMD optimizations, and minimizing heap allocations to systematically identify and resolve performance bottlenecks
• Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
• Able to commit reliably to 20–40 hours per week
• Self-directed and comfortable working asynchronously across a distributed team

Nice to Have

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

Why Join Us

• Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs — your code ships and matters
• Fully remote and flexible — structure your hours around your life
• Collaborate with world-class engineers and researchers on genuinely hard technical problems
• Freelance autonomy with the substance and impact of a high-stakes engineering role
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale and evolve