Systems Programmer - AI Data Pipelines

Systems Programmer — AI Data Pipelines About The Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure behind the world’s most advanced AI systems? We’re looking for a senior Rust engineer to design and build the high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that leading AI labs depend on to train and improve their models.

This is a fully remote contract role working on real production systems — not toy projects. You’ll collaborate with research and engineering teams at the frontier of AI development, solving hard systems problems that 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 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 production Rust codebases
• Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior — then implement scalable, robust fixes
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
• Participate in synchronous design and code reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

Who You Are

• Native or fluent English speaker with strong written and verbal communication skills
• 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust
• Deep command of Rust lifetimes, ownership mechanics, and idiomatic error handling patterns
• Proven experience building I/O-bound data pipelines with robust retry and backoff logic
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliable availability for collaboration
• Self-directed and effective working independently in a remote environment

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 in systems programming, infrastructure engineering, or platform work

Why Join Us

• Work directly with leading AI labs on production systems at the frontier of AI research
• Fully remote and flexible — structure your week around the work, not the other way around
• Freelance autonomy paired with meaningful, high-impact engineering challenges
• Build systems that have a direct, measurable influence on how next-generation AI models are trained and evaluated
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch