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.
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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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