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