Rust Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Senior Rust Software Engineer - Distributed Systems (AI Infrastructure)

About the Role

What if your deep knowledge of Rust and distributed systems could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for Senior Rust Engineers to build and optimize the high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that leading AI labs depend on every day.

This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who thrive on hard problems - concurrency, distributed state, systems performance, and scale. If you've spent years writing production Rust and want your work to matter, this is where it counts.

• 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 large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop full-stack backend services and tooling for data annotation, validation, and quality control
• Improve reliability, safety, and performance across existing production Rust codebases
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation infrastructure
• Identify bottlenecks, edge cases, and failure modes - then implement scalable, robust fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews and iterate rapidly on architecture and implementation decisions

Who You Are

• 3-5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust
• Strong background building distributed services using RPC frameworks and managing distributed state or consensus
• Experienced debugging complex concurrency issues - deadlocks, race conditions - using async instrumentation and tracing tools
• A clear communicator, both in writing and in technical discussions
• Able to commit 20-40 hours per week consistently
• Native or fluent English speaker

Nice to Have

• Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or evaluation systems
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructure
• Background in distributed systems design or developer tooling
• Experience contributing to or reviewing production systems at scale

Why Join Us

• Work on real, high-stakes infrastructure used by leading AI research labs
• Fully remote and flexible - work from anywhere, on a schedule that suits you
• Freelance autonomy paired with the structure of meaningful, technically challenging work
• Collaborate with top engineers and researchers working at the frontier of AI development
• Potential for ongoing engagement and expanded scope as new projects launch