Principal Systems Engineer (C++) - AI Infrastructure

Principal Systems Engineer (C++) — AI Infrastructure About The Role What if your systems engineering expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world’s most advanced AI models? We’re looking for a Principal C++ Systems Engineer to design and build the high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure that leading AI labs depend on to train and improve next-generation models.

This is a fully remote contract role working on real production systems — not toy projects. You’ll be embedded in high-impact engineering workflows alongside researchers and engineers 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 C++ systems supporting large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for data annotation, validation, and quality control at scale
• Improve reliability, performance, and memory safety across existing production C++ codebases
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation infrastructure
• Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in system and data behavior — then implement clean, scalable fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

Who You Are

• Native or fluent English speaker with strong written and verbal communication skills
• Full-stack developer with a deep systems programming background and production C++ experience
• 5+ years writing production-grade C++ for large-scale, high-performance systems
• Advanced knowledge of build system architecture and package management strategies
• Experienced in designing reliable systems with rigorous error handling and memory safety practices — including the use of memory sanitizers
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with professional reliability

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 distributed systems design or developer tooling

Why Join Us

• Work directly on production systems used by leading AI research labs
• Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinking
• Freelance autonomy with the structure and consistency of meaningful long-term projects
• Make a tangible impact on the infrastructure that trains and evaluates frontier AI models
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch