Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform

Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) — AI Platform About The Role What if your mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We’re looking for a senior Rust engineer to build and lead the systems that sit at the heart of real AI production workflows — from high-throughput data pipelines to evaluation infrastructure used by leading AI labs.

This isn’t a sandbox project. You’ll be working on real, high-impact systems that researchers and engineers depend on every day.

• Organization: Alignerr
• Type: Hourly Contract
• Location: Remote
• Commitment: 20–40 hours/week

What You’ll Do

• Design and build high-performance, production-grade systems in Rust that power AI data pipelines and model 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 Rust codebases — finding and fixing bottlenecks before they become problems
• Collaborate closely with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation at scale
• Identify edge cases and systemic failure points in data and system behavior, then implement scalable, lasting fixes
• Lead synchronous design reviews, contributing architectural vision and driving implementation decisions

Who You Are

• Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
• 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust, with strong focus on system architecture and API design
• Deep expertise in FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and unsafe Rust — you know where the boundaries are and how to work them effectively
• Advanced knowledge of asynchronous runtimes and multi-threaded environments — thread safety isn’t an afterthought for you
• Able to lead system design reviews and communicate technical decisions clearly to cross-functional teams
• Available to commit 20–40 hours per week on a contract basis

Nice to Have

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

Why Join Us

• Work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure alongside leading research labs — this is real production work, not toy projects
• Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinking
• Freelance autonomy with the structure and impact of meaningful, high-stakes engineering work
• Collaborate with a network of top engineers and researchers pushing the frontier of AI development
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch