Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform

About the Role

What if your mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a senior Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems — data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure — that leading AI labs depend on to train and improve their models.

This is a fully remote, flexible contract role. You'll work on real production systems alongside data, research, and engineering teams at the frontier of AI development.

• 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 full-stack tooling and backend services for data annotation, validation, and quality control
• Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing Rust codebases
• Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in system and data behavior — then implement scalable, production-ready fixes
• Collaborate closely with research and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
• Lead synchronous system design reviews and contribute architectural decisions that raise the bar across the codebase

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 understanding of asynchronous runtimes and thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments
• A systems thinker who can lead technical discussions and drive architectural decisions with confidence
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently

Nice to Have

• Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or evaluation systems
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructure
• Experience building distributed systems or developer tooling

Why Join Us

• Work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure alongside top research labs and engineering teams
• Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinking
• Freelance autonomy with the depth and impact of meaningful, high-stakes engineering work
• Tackle genuinely hard systems problems that matter — your work directly influences how the world's most advanced AI models are built
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch