Principal Rust Engineer — ML Infrastructure (AI Training)
About The Role
What if your mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI models? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to design and build high-performance systems at the heart of real AI research and production workflows — working alongside leading AI labs on the tools and pipelines that make cutting-edge AI possible.
This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for an experienced Rust engineer who thrives on hard technical problems, cares deeply about performance and correctness, 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 supporting AI data pipelines and model evaluation workflows
Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control
Improve reliability, performance, and memory safety across existing production Rust codebases
Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to accelerate model training and evaluation workflows
Identify and resolve bottlenecks and edge cases in complex data and system behavior
Participate in synchronous design reviews and contribute to high-impact architectural decisions
Who You Are
Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust for data-intensive applications
Deep expertise in memory management, ownership semantics, 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 reliable availability
You write code that other senior engineers learn from — and you're proud of it
Nice to Have
Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems
Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training pipelines, or benchmarking infrastructure
Experience with distributed systems, developer tooling, or systems programming at scale
Why Join Us
Work on real production systems for leading AI research labs — not toy problems
Fully remote and flexible — work when and where you do your best thinking
Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-impact engineering work
Contribute to infrastructure that directly shapes how next-generation AI models are built and evaluated
Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects grow and evolve