Principal Rust Engineer - ML Infrastructure
About this role
About the Role What if your deep Rust expertise could directly influence the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure at production scale. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who live and breathe Rust and want to work on problems that genuinely matter. - 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 backend services and full-stack tooling for data annotation, validation, and quality control - Improve reliability, performance, and memory safety across existing Rust codebases - Identify and resolve bottlenecks, edge cases, and failure modes in data-intensive systems - Collaborate closely with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows - Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are - Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills - 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust for data-intensive applications - Deep understanding of memory management and zero-copy deserialization with minimal runtime overhead - Experienced integrating Rust with machine learning frameworks or columnar data standards to support model training workflows - Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with consistency and reliability - Self-directed and effective working asynchronously across distributed teams Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or evaluation systems - Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines - Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling - Background contributing to or maintaining open-source Rust projects Why Join Us - Work directly on infrastructure used by leading AI research labs on real production systems - Fully remote and flexible — work when and where you do your best work - Freelance autonomy with meaningful, high-impact technical work that pushes the boundaries of what Rust can do - Collaborate with world-class engineers and researchers working on next-generation AI - Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch
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