Data Infrastructure Engineer (Rust) - High Performance Computing

About the job Senior Rust Engineer — AI Data Infrastructure About The Role What if your expertise in Rust could directly shape the infrastructure behind the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Senior Rust Engineer to design and build high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that power cutting-edge AI research and production workflows. This is a fully remote contract role working alongside leading AI labs on real, high-impact engineering challenges — not toy projects. If you live and breathe Rust and care deeply about performance, safety, and correctness, this is the work you've been waiting for. 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 large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for data annotation, validation, and quality control at scale Identify and eliminate bottlenecks — squeezing every bit of performance from memory layout, SIMD optimizations, and concurrency patterns Improve reliability, correctness, and safety across existing production Rust codebases Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are 5+ years of professional experience writing production-grade Rust Deep expertise in data parallelism and concurrency patterns to maximize CPU saturation Mastery of memory layout, SIMD optimizations, and minimizing heap allocations to systematically identify and resolve performance bottlenecks Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills Able to commit reliably to 20–40 hours per week Self-directed and comfortable working asynchronously across a distributed team Nice to Have 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 Exposure to working with or alongside AI research teams Why Join Us Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs — your code ships and matters Fully remote and flexible — structure your hours around your life Collaborate with world-class engineers and researchers on genuinely hard technical problems Freelance autonomy with the substance and impact of a high-stakes engineering role Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale and evolve