Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform
About this role
About the Role What if your deep Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a Senior Rust Full-Stack Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure that runs at scale. This is a fully remote contract role with meaningful, senior-level work and real impact on production AI systems. - 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 AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows - Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control - Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing Rust codebases - Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior, and implement scalable, production-ready fixes - Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows - Lead synchronous design reviews, iterating on system architecture and implementation decisions with cross-functional teams Who You Are - Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills - 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust, with a strong focus on system architecture and API design - Deep expertise in FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and unsafe Rust boundaries to optimize cross-language interactions - Advanced knowledge of asynchronous runtimes and ensuring thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments - Comfortable leading system design reviews and driving technical decisions independently - Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, 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 on real production systems used by leading AI research labs — not toy projects - Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best work - Senior-level, technically challenging work that moves fast and matters - Collaborate with top engineers and researchers at the frontier of AI development - Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale
Application listings
Choose a source listing and check its country requirements.