Rust Engineer

Rust Engineer

Location

Anywhere (US-EU timezones)

Job posted

May 11, 2026

Type

⚙️ Engineering

About us

We're building the next-generation web search engine for AI. Our infrastructure runs on clusters of 1,000+ machines, processing petabytes of data and powering large-scale retrieval for production AI workloads.

We've raised a top notch seed round from leading US and European investors. Our team is composed of the top 0.1% of talent in the field: PhD researchers and engineers from Amazon Alexa and leading research labs, ex-MBB consultants, and operators from venture-backed startups. We hire only people who can be the best in the world at what they do.

We're already in production with design-partner customers across enterprise search, AI research, and vertical AI applications. The opportunity is enormous. The bar is high. If you want to define a category, this is the place.

The role

We're hiring Rust engineers to build the core of our search infrastructure. The systems you'll work on operate at the scale of the entire web: petabyte-scale storage, billions of documents, millisecond-level retrieval, thousands of concurrent indexing and serving nodes.

This is foundational systems work. You will write Rust that runs in production at scale from day one. You will design and own components that the rest of the company depends on. You will work directly with our CTO and founding engineers, with full ownership of your area and direct impact on the product.

We are looking for engineers who care about performance, correctness, and elegance in equal measure. The work is hard. The systems are real. The impact is immediate.

What you'll own

Core Rust systems. Design, build, and maintain Rust services that sit on the critical path of crawling, indexing, retrieval, or serving. You own the components end to end: API surface, data structures, concurrency model, performance.

Distributed systems at scale. Our infrastructure runs across thousands of nodes. You will work on coordination, replication, sharding, and fault tolerance for systems that cannot go down.

Performance and reliability. You profile, optimize, and harden the code that runs hot. You care about p99 latencies, memory footprint, and what happens under load that nobody planned for.

Production ownership. You don't throw code over the wall. You ship, you observe, you debug in production, you iterate. Operational excellence is part of the engineering job.

Technical direction. You bring opinions on architecture, libraries, and trade-offs. You shape how the codebase evolves, not just what gets built next sprint.

Who you are

You have 3+ years of professional Rust experience writing production systems code.

You have built distributed systems that handled real production load. Search engines, databases, indexing systems, streaming systems, or comparable infrastructure.

You are comfortable reasoning about concurrency, memory, and performance at a deep level. You know what a cache miss costs and when it matters.

You write code that other engineers want to read. You take correctness, testing, and observability seriously.

You move fast. You ship the first version, learn, and ship the second. Velocity is non-negotiable.

You operate well in ambiguity and make calls without complete information.

Bonus

Experience at companies building search, retrieval, vector databases, or large-scale data infrastructure (MongoDB, Algolia, Elastic, Pinecone, ClickHouse, and similar).

Contributions to open-source Rust projects in the systems, storage, or search space.

Experience with Tokio, async Rust at scale, and the trade-offs of high-concurrency systems.

Background in information retrieval, ranking, or large-scale data pipelines.

What we offer

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. This is a founding-team hire and the equity reflects it.

Direct work with the founders. No layers, no political theater.

Anywhere compatible with US-EU timezones.

Comprehensive benefits package, including US health insurance, US 401k, flexible time off and more.

Visa sponsorship for international candidates (e.g., STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, E3).

Seltz is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Email your application View email address on careers.speedinvest.com