Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data & Distributed Systems
About The Role
What if your deep knowledge of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for a Senior Rust Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance distributed systems, data pipelines, and evaluation tooling that leading AI labs depend on every day.
This is a fully remote contract role with flexible hours. If you thrive on hard systems problems — concurrency, distributed state, performance at scale — 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 production-grade Rust systems supporting large-scale AI data pipelines and model evaluation workflows
Develop full-stack backend services and tooling for data annotation, validation, and quality control
Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing Rust codebases
Debug complex concurrency issues — deadlocks, race conditions, and async edge cases — using instrumentation and tracing tools
Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation infrastructure
Identify bottlenecks and implement scalable, robust fixes
Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on system architecture and implementation decisions
Who You Are
3–5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust
Strong background in distributed systems — RPC frameworks, distributed state, consensus mechanisms
Experienced at debugging complex concurrency issues using async instrumentation and tracing tools
Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliable availability
Self-directed and comfortable working asynchronously in a remote environment
Nice to Have
Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems
Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training pipelines, or benchmarking infrastructure
Background in developer tooling or systems-level software
Experience contributing to or maintaining open-source Rust projects
Why Join Us
Work directly with leading AI research labs on real production systems — not toy projects
Fully remote and flexible — structure your week around the work, not the other way around
Freelance autonomy with the depth and impact of meaningful engineering work
Tackle some of the hardest distributed systems challenges in the AI space
Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale and evolve