Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) — AI Platform
About The Role
What if your deep Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a Senior Rust Full-Stack Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure that runs at scale.
This is a fully remote contract role with meaningful, senior-level work and real impact on production AI systems.
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 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
Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior, and implement scalable, production-ready fixes
Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
Lead synchronous design reviews, iterating on system architecture and implementation decisions with cross-functional teams
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 knowledge of asynchronous runtimes and ensuring thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments
Comfortable leading system design reviews and driving technical decisions independently
Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently
Nice to Have
Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, 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 on real production systems used by leading AI research labs — not toy projects
Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best work
Senior-level, technically challenging work that moves fast and matters
Collaborate with top engineers and researchers at the frontier of AI development
Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale