Rust Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data & Distributed Infrastructure About The Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a seasoned Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance distributed systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation infrastructure at scale. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for engineers who write production Rust, think deeply about distributed systems, and want their work to matter.

Organization: Alignerr

Type: Hourly Contract

Location: Remote

Commitment: 20–40 hours/week What You'll Do Design, build, and optimize high-performance Rust systems that support AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows

Develop full-stack backend services and tooling for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control

Improve reliability, safety, and performance across existing production Rust codebases

Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows

Identify and resolve bottlenecks, edge cases, and systemic issues in distributed data systems

Participate in synchronous design reviews and iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust

Strong background building distributed services using RPC frameworks and managing distributed state or consensus

Experienced debugging complex concurrency issues — deadlocks, race conditions — using async instrumentation and tracing tools

Clear, precise written and verbal communicator — you can articulate technical decisions to a mixed audience

Native or fluent English speaker

Available and able to commit 20–40 hours per week 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

Background in developer tooling or platform engineering 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 thinking

Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-stakes engineering work

Tackle genuinely hard technical problems at the intersection of systems engineering and AI

Potential for ongoing engagement and expanded scope as projects evolve

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