Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform
Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) — AI Platform
About The Role:
What if your deep Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a Senior Rust Full-Stack Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure that runs at scale. This is a fully remote contract role with meaningful, senior-level work and real impact on production AI systems.
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 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
- Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior, and implement scalable, production-ready fixes
- Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
- Lead synchronous design reviews, iterating on system architecture and implementation decisions with cross-functional teams
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 knowledge of asynchronous runtimes and ensuring thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments
- Comfortable leading system design reviews and driving technical decisions independently
- Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently
Nice to Have:
- Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems
- Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines
- Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling
- Background contributing to or maintaining open-source Rust projects
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 work
- Senior-level, technically challenging work that moves fast and matters
- Collaborate with top engineers and researchers at the frontier of AI development
- Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale