Rust Software Engineer - Distributed Systems
Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data & Distributed Systems About The Role What if your deep knowledge of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for a Senior Rust Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance distributed systems, data pipelines, and evaluation tooling that leading AI labs depend on every day. This is a fully remote contract role with flexible hours. If you thrive on hard systems problems — concurrency, distributed state, performance at scale — this is the work you've been waiting for. Organization: Alignerr Type: Hourly Contract Location: Remote Commitment: 20–40 hours/week
What You'll Do
Design, build, and optimize production-grade Rust systems supporting large-scale AI data pipelines and model evaluation workflows Develop full-stack backend services and tooling for data annotation, validation, and quality control Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing Rust codebases Debug complex concurrency issues — deadlocks, race conditions, and async edge cases — using instrumentation and tracing tools Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation infrastructure Identify bottlenecks and implement scalable, robust fixes Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on system architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust Strong background in distributed systems — RPC frameworks, distributed state, consensus mechanisms Experienced at debugging complex concurrency issues using async instrumentation and tracing tools Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliable availability Self-directed and comfortable working asynchronously in a remote environment
Nice to Have
Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training pipelines, or benchmarking infrastructure Background in developer tooling or systems-level software Experience contributing to or maintaining open-source Rust projects
Why Join Us
Work directly with leading AI research labs on real production systems — not toy projects Fully remote and flexible — structure your week around the work, not the other way around Freelance autonomy with the depth and impact of meaningful engineering work Tackle some of the hardest distributed systems challenges in the AI space Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale and evolve