Principal Rust Engineer - ML Infrastructure
About this role
About the Role What if your mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering next-generation AI models? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to design and build the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation frameworks that run at production scale. This is a fully remote contract role working alongside world-class research and engineering teams. If you live and breathe Rust and want your work to matter at the frontier of AI development, this is built for you. - 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 model evaluation workflows - Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control - Improve reliability, performance, and memory safety across existing Rust codebases - Collaborate closely with data, research, and engineering teams to accelerate model training and evaluation - Identify bottlenecks and edge cases across data and system behavior — then implement scalable, production-grade fixes - 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 expertise in memory management and zero-copy deserialization with minimal runtime overhead - Experienced integrating Rust with machine learning frameworks or columnar data standards to support training workflows - Self-directed and dependable — able to commit 20–40 hours per week and deliver with minimal hand-holding Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation, data quality systems, or evaluation pipelines - Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructure - Background in distributed systems or developer tooling Why Join Us - Work directly with leading AI labs on real production systems — not toy projects - Fully remote and async-friendly — work on your own schedule from anywhere - Freelance autonomy with the structure and focus of meaningful, high-stakes engineering work - Build infrastructure that shapes how next-generation AI models are trained and evaluated - Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch
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