About the Role
What if your deep Rust expertise could directly influence the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure at production scale.
This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who live and breathe Rust and want to work on problems that genuinely 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 supporting large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
- Develop backend services and full-stack tooling for data annotation, validation, and quality control
- Improve reliability, performance, and memory safety across existing Rust codebases
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks, edge cases, and failure modes in data-intensive systems
- Collaborate closely 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
- 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
- Experienced 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 effective working asynchronously across distributed teams
Nice to Have
- Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or evaluation systems
- Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines
- Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling
- Background contributing to or maintaining open-source Rust projects
Why Join Us
- Work directly on infrastructure used by leading AI research labs on real production systems
- Fully remote and flexible — work when and where you do your best work
- Freelance autonomy with meaningful, high-impact technical work that pushes the boundaries of what Rust can do
- Collaborate with world-class engineers and researchers working on next-generation AI
- Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch