Backend & Tooling Engineer (Rust)

About The Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Senior Rust Engineer to build and optimize the data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that leading AI labs depend on to train and improve their models. This is real, high-impact engineering work — not a side project. You'll be embedded in production workflows, solving hard problems at scale, and collaborating with research and engineering teams at the frontier of AI development.

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

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and optimize high-performance systems in Rust supporting AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows
• Develop backend services and full-stack tooling 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 — then implement scalable, production-ready fixes
• Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions

Who You Are

• Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills
• 5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust
• Proven track record building high-performance backend web services and robust CLI tools
• Experienced with type-safe database interactions and connection pooling for large-scale data workloads
• Self-directed and reliable — able to commit 20–40 hours per week and deliver consistently
• Comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments alongside world-class teams

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 at scale

Why Join Us

• Work on production systems powering cutting-edge AI research at leading labs
• Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best work
• Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, long-term technical work
• Collaborate with world-class engineers and researchers on problems that genuinely matter
• Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch