Rust Software Engineer - Distributed Systems
About this role
About the Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a seasoned Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance distributed systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure at scale. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who write production Rust, think deeply about distributed systems, and want their work to matter. - 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 support AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows - Develop full-stack backend services and tooling for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control - Improve reliability, safety, and performance across existing production Rust codebases - Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows - Identify and resolve bottlenecks, edge cases, and systemic issues in distributed data systems - Participate in synchronous design reviews and iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are - 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust - Strong background building distributed services using RPC frameworks and managing distributed state or consensus - Experienced debugging complex concurrency issues — deadlocks, race conditions — using async instrumentation and tracing tools - Clear, precise written and verbal communicator — you can articulate technical decisions to a mixed audience - Native or fluent English speaker - Available and able to commit 20–40 hours per week 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 - Background in developer tooling or platform engineering Why Join Us - Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs — not toy projects - Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinking - Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-stakes engineering work - Tackle genuinely hard technical problems at the intersection of systems engineering and AI - Potential for ongoing engagement and expanded scope as projects evolve
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