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