Rust Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

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 distributed systems, data pipelines, and tooling that leading AI labs depend on — working on real production systems with real consequences.

This is a fully remote, flexible contract role. If you're the kind of engineer who gets satisfaction from writing safe, performant, correct code at scale — and you want that work to matter — 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 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 Rust codebases
• Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows
• Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in distributed system behavior and implement scalable solutions
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

• Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
• 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust
• Strong background in building distributed services using RPC frameworks, distributed state management, or consensus protocols
• Experienced debugging complex concurrency issues — deadlocks, race conditions — using async instrumentation and tracing tools
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week on a consistent basis
• Self-directed and reliable when working in a remote, async-first environment

• 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

• Work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure projects alongside leading research labs
• Fully remote and flexible — work when and where you do your best work
• Freelance autonomy with the substance of high-impact, production-grade engineering
• Contribute directly to systems that shape how next-generation AI models are built and evaluated
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch