Senior Rust Engineer – AI Data Infrastructure

Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data Infrastructure About The Role What if your expertise in Rust could directly shape the infrastructure behind the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Senior Rust Engineer to design and build high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that power cutting-edge AI research and production workflows. This is a fully remote contract role working alongside leading AI labs on real, high-impact engineering challenges — not toy projects. If you live and breathe Rust and care deeply about performance, safety, and correctness, this is the work you've been waiting for. Organization: AlignerrType: Hourly ContractLocation: RemoteCommitment: 20–40 hours/week What You'll Do Design, build, and optimize high-performance systems in Rust supporting large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflowsDevelop full-stack tooling and backend services for data annotation, validation, and quality control at scaleIdentify and eliminate bottlenecks — squeezing every bit of performance from memory layout, SIMD optimizations, and concurrency patternsImprove reliability, correctness, and safety across existing production Rust codebasesCollaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflowsParticipate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are 5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade RustDeep expertise in data parallelism and concurrency patterns to maximize CPU saturationMastery of memory layout, SIMD optimizations, and minimizing heap allocations to systematically identify and resolve performance bottlenecksNative or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skillsAble to commit reliably to 20–40 hours per weekSelf-directed and comfortable working asynchronously across a distributed team Nice to Have Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or evaluation systemsFamiliarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructureExperience building distributed systems or developer toolingExposure to working with or alongside AI research teams Why Join Us Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs — your code ships and mattersFully remote and flexible — structure your hours around your lifeCollaborate with world-class engineers and researchers on genuinely hard technical problemsFreelance autonomy with the substance and impact of a high-stakes engineering rolePotential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale and evolve