Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform
About this role
About the Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Senior Rust Full-Stack Engineer to build high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure for leading AI labs — working on systems that matter at scale. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who know Rust deeply and want to apply it to genuinely hard, high-impact problems at the frontier of AI development. - Organization: Alignerr - Type: Hourly Contract - Location: Remote - Commitment: 20–40 hours/week What You'll Do - Design, build, and optimize high-performance systems in Rust 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 - Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows - Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior, and implement scalable, production-ready fixes - Lead synchronous system design reviews and drive key architectural decisions 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 command of asynchronous runtimes and thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments - Able to lead technical reviews and communicate design tradeoffs clearly to cross-functional teams - Available to commit 20–40 hours per week on a consistent basis Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems - Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines - Experience building distributed systems or developer tooling - Background working with or alongside AI research teams Why Join Us - Work directly on production systems and high-impact infrastructure for leading AI labs - Tackle genuinely hard Rust engineering challenges — not toy projects - Fully remote and flexible — work on a schedule that fits your life - Freelance autonomy combined with meaningful, technically rich work - Collaborate with world-class data, research, and engineering teams shaping the future of AI - Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch
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