Backend & Tooling Engineer (Rust)
About this role
About the Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI models? We're looking for a senior Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation frameworks and backend services. This is a fully remote contract role with meaningful, high-impact work across real production systems. If you write Rust the way it's meant to be written — fast, safe, and reliable — this is the role 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 large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows - Develop backend services and full-stack tooling for data annotation, validation, and quality control - Improve reliability, safety, and performance across existing Rust codebases - Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation infrastructure - Identify bottlenecks and edge cases across data flows and system behavior — then implement scalable, production-grade fixes - Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are - 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust - Proven track record building high-performance backend web services and robust CLI tooling - Experienced with type-safe database interactions and connection pooling at scale - Clear, confident written and verbal communicator in English - Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently - Self-directed and effective working asynchronously across a distributed team Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or model evaluation systems - Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructure - Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling - Background working directly with AI or research engineering teams Why Join Us - Work on real, high-impact AI infrastructure alongside top research labs - Fully remote and flexible — build from wherever you do your best work - Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, long-term technical projects - Solve genuinely hard systems problems that directly influence how next-generation AI is built and evaluated - Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch
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