Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform
About this role
About the Role What if your mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a Lead Systems Engineer to design and build high-performance systems at the heart of real AI production workflows — data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure used by leading AI labs. This is a fully remote contract role for a senior Rust engineer who thrives on hard problems, cares deeply about correctness and performance, and wants their work to matter at scale. - Organization: Alignerr - Type: Hourly Contract - Location: Remote - Commitment: 20–40 hours/week What You'll Do - Design, build, and optimize high-performance Rust systems that power 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 system and data behavior — and implement scalable, lasting fixes - Lead synchronous design reviews, driving architecture decisions and implementation quality Who You Are - Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills - 5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust, with a strong focus on system architecture and API design - Deep expertise in FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and unsafe Rust boundaries for cross-language optimization - Advanced command of asynchronous runtimes and thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments - Comfortable leading system design reviews and making high-stakes architectural decisions - Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliability and focus Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or AI evaluation systems - Familiarity with ML workflows, model training pipelines, or benchmarking infrastructure - Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling Why Join Us - Work on real production systems alongside top AI research labs — not toy projects - Fully remote and async-friendly — work where and when you do your best thinking - Meaningful, high-leverage engineering work at the frontier of AI infrastructure - Freelance autonomy with consistent, structured work and real technical depth - Potential for ongoing engagement and expanded scope as projects grow
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