Principal Rust Engineer - ML Infrastructure
About this role
About the Role What if your mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI models? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to design and build high-performance systems at the heart of real AI research and production workflows — working alongside leading AI labs on the tools and pipelines that make cutting-edge AI possible. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for an experienced Rust engineer who thrives on hard technical problems, cares deeply about performance and correctness, 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 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 production Rust codebases - Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to accelerate model training and evaluation workflows - Identify and resolve bottlenecks and edge cases in complex data and system behavior - Participate in synchronous design reviews and contribute to high-impact architectural decisions Who You Are - Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills - 5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust for data-intensive applications - Deep expertise in memory management, ownership semantics, and zero-copy deserialization with minimal runtime overhead - Proven experience integrating Rust with machine learning frameworks or columnar data standards to support model training workflows - Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliable availability - You write code that other senior engineers learn from — and you're proud of it Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems - Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training pipelines, or benchmarking infrastructure - Experience with distributed systems, developer tooling, or systems programming at scale Why Join Us - Work on real production systems for leading AI research labs — not toy problems - Fully remote and flexible — work when and where you do your best thinking - Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-impact engineering work - Contribute to infrastructure that directly shapes how next-generation AI models are built and evaluated - Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects grow and evolve
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