Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data & Infrastructure

About The Role

What if your systems programming expertise could directly shape the infrastructure behind some of the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for a Senior Rust Engineer to build and optimize the high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that leading AI labs depend on to train and improve next-generation models.

This is a fully remote contract role with serious technical depth. You'll be working on real production systems --- not toy projects --- alongside 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 systems in Rust that power AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop backend services and tooling for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control
• Improve reliability, performance, and memory safety across existing Rust codebases
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
• Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior --- then implement scalable, production-ready fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

Who You Are

• 5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust
• Strong systems programming foundation --- you think carefully about performance, concurrency, and memory safety
• Proven experience building backend services, developer tooling, or data pipelines
• Clear, direct communicator --- written and verbal --- comfortable working across technical and research teams
• Able to commit 20--40 hours per week with consistency and reliability

Nice to Have

• Prior experience with data annotation systems, data quality pipelines, or model evaluation infrastructure
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines
• Experience with distributed systems design or developer tooling at scale
• Exposure to Go, Python, or C++ in a systems context

Why Join Us

• Work directly with leading AI labs on real, production-grade infrastructure that matters
• Fully remote --- work from anywhere, on a schedule that fits your life
• Freelance autonomy with the structure and focus of high-impact, technically challenging work
• Contribute to systems that shape how the world's most advanced AI models are built and evaluated
• Potential for ongoing engagement and expanded scope as projects grow