Backend & Tooling Engineer (Rust)
About The Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI models? We're looking for a senior Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation frameworks and backend services. This is a fully remote contract role with meaningful, high-impact work across real production systems. If you write Rust the way it's meant to be written — fast, safe, and reliable — this is the role for you. 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 large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows Develop backend services and full-stack tooling for data annotation, validation, and quality control Improve reliability, safety, and performance across existing Rust codebases Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation infrastructure Identify bottlenecks and edge cases across data flows and system behavior — then implement scalable, production-grade fixes Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust Proven track record building high-performance backend web services and robust CLI tooling Experienced with type-safe database interactions and connection pooling at scale Clear, confident written and verbal communicator in English Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently Self-directed and effective working asynchronously across a distributed team
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 Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling Background working directly with AI or research engineering teams
Why Join Us
Work on real, high-impact AI infrastructure alongside top research labs Fully remote and flexible — build from wherever you do your best work Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, long-term technical projects Solve genuinely hard systems problems that directly influence how next-generation AI is built and evaluated Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch