Principal Rust Engineer - ML Infrastructure
About this role
About the Role What if your deep mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure that powers the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to build, optimize, and harden the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation frameworks that influence how next-generation models are trained. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for an experienced engineer who writes production-grade Rust and thrives at the intersection of systems programming and AI infrastructure. - Organization: Alignerr - Type: Hourly Contract - Location: Remote - Commitment: 20–40 hours/week What You'll Do - Design and build high-performance, production-grade systems in Rust supporting large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows - Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for data annotation, validation, and quality control at scale - Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing Rust codebases used in real AI production environments - Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows - Identify bottlenecks, edge cases, and systemic issues — then implement scalable, elegant solutions - 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 or systems-level applications - Deep understanding of memory management, ownership semantics, 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 comfortable working asynchronously across distributed teams Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation pipelines, data quality systems, or evaluation infrastructure - Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines - Background in distributed systems architecture or developer tooling - Experience working directly with AI research teams or in a fast-moving lab environment Why Join Us - Work on real production systems powering cutting-edge AI research at leading labs - Fully remote and flexible — structure your hours around your life - Freelance autonomy with the substance of high-impact, technically challenging work - Collaborate with world-class engineers and researchers at the frontier of AI development - Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch
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