Backend & Tooling Engineer (Rust)

What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI models? We're looking for a senior Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation frameworks and backend services.

This is a fully remote contract role with meaningful, high-impact work across real production systems. If you write Rust the way it's meant to be written — fast, safe, and reliable — this is the role for you.

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

• Design, build, and optimize high-performance Rust systems supporting large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop backend services and full-stack tooling for data annotation, validation, and quality control
• Improve reliability, safety, and performance across existing Rust codebases
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation infrastructure
• Identify bottlenecks and edge cases across data flows and system behavior — then implement scalable, production-grade fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

• 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust
• Proven track record building high-performance backend web services and robust CLI tooling
• Experienced with type-safe database interactions and connection pooling at scale
• Clear, confident written and verbal communicator in English
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently
• Self-directed and effective working asynchronously across a distributed team

• Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or model evaluation systems
• Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructure
• Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling
• Background working directly with AI or research engineering teams

• Work on real, high-impact AI infrastructure alongside top research labs
• Fully remote and flexible — build from wherever you do your best work
• Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, long-term technical projects
• Solve genuinely hard systems problems that directly influence how next-generation AI is built and evaluated
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch