Systems Programmer - AI Data Pipelines

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 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 problems or throwaway scripts. If you care deeply about performance, safety, and correctness, and you want your work to have meaningful impact at the frontier of AI development, this is the role for you.

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

• Design, build, and optimize high-performance systems in Rust 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 data and system behavior, and implement scalable fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on system architecture and implementation decisions

• 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 — you write Rust the way it's meant to be written
• Experienced building I/O-bound data pipelines with robust retry and backoff logic for production environments
• Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliability and consistency
• Self-directed and comfortable working asynchronously across distributed teams

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

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