About this role · Coding
About the Role What if your C engineering skills could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to design and build the data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that leading AI labs depend on to train and improve next-generation models. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for an experienced engineer who thrives on high-impact, technically demanding work. If you've spent years building scalable backend systems and want to apply that expertise at the frontier of AI development — this is the role. - Organization: Alignerr - Type: Hourly Contract - Location: Remote - Commitment: 20–40 hours/week What You'll Do - Design, build, and optimize high-performance systems in C that support AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows - Develop backend services and full-stack tooling for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control - Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing C codebases used in production AI systems - Collaborate closely 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, robust fixes - Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on system architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are - Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills - 5+ years of professional experience building scalable backend services in C - Strong systems programming background with full-stack development experience - Deep familiarity with modern frameworks for building RESTful APIs and RPC services for inter-service communication - Experienced integrating with cloud-native data services and orchestrating workflows via message bus architectures - Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with consistency and reliability Nice to Have - Prior experience with data annotation, data quality systems, or evaluation pipelines - Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructure - Experience with distributed systems or internal developer tooling - Background working with or alongside AI research teams Why Join Us - Work on real, production-grade systems used by leading AI research labs - Fully remote and flexible — work on your own schedule from anywhere - Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-impact engineering work - Contribute directly to the infrastructure that shapes how next-generation AI models are built and evaluated - Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch