Backend & Tooling Engineer (Rust)

About The Role

What if your Rust expertise 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, and developer tooling that leading AI labs depend on to train and evaluate cutting-edge models.

This is a fully remote contract role for someone who takes genuine pride in writing safe, fast, production-grade Rust — and wants to work on systems where performance and reliability genuinely matter.

• 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 full-stack backend services and CLI tooling for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control
• Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing production Rust codebases
• Collaborate closely with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation at scale
• Identify performance bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior, then implement scalable, robust fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions
  
  

Who You Are

• Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
• 5 years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust
• Proven ability to build high-performance backend web services and robust, user-friendly CLI tools
• Experienced with type-safe database interactions and connection pooling for handling large-scale data workloads
• Detail-oriented and systematic — you think carefully about correctness, edge cases, and system behavior
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with consistency and reliability
  
  

Nice to Have

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

Why Join Us

• Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs
• Fully remote and async-friendly — work when and where you do your best work
• Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, high-impact technical work
• Contribute directly to infrastructure that shapes how next-generation AI models are built and evaluated
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch