Senior Rust Software Engineer – Distributed Systems

Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data & Distributed Infrastructure About The Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a seasoned Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance distributed systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure at scale. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who write production Rust, think deeply about distributed systems, and want their work to matter. Organization: AlignerrType: Hourly ContractLocation: RemoteCommitment: 20–40 hours/week What You'll Do Design, build, and optimize high-performance Rust systems that support AI data pipelines and evaluation workflowsDevelop full-stack backend services and tooling for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality controlImprove reliability, safety, and performance across existing production Rust codebasesCollaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflowsIdentify and resolve bottlenecks, edge cases, and systemic issues in distributed data systemsParticipate in synchronous design reviews and iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade RustStrong background building distributed services using RPC frameworks and managing distributed state or consensusExperienced debugging complex concurrency issues — deadlocks, race conditions — using async instrumentation and tracing toolsClear, precise written and verbal communicator — you can articulate technical decisions to a mixed audienceNative or fluent English speakerAvailable and able to commit 20–40 hours per week Nice to Have Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or model evaluation systemsFamiliarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructureBackground in developer tooling or platform engineering Why Join Us Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs — not toy projectsFully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinkingFreelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-stakes engineering workTackle genuinely hard technical problems at the intersection of systems engineering and AIPotential for ongoing engagement and expanded scope as projects evolve