Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) - AI Platform

About the job Lead Systems Engineer (Rust) — AI Platform About The Role What if your mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering the next generation of AI? We're looking for a senior Rust engineer to build and optimize the high-performance systems — data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure — that leading AI labs depend on to train and improve their models. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role. You'll work on real production systems alongside data, 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 Rust systems supporting large-scale AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for data annotation, validation, and quality control Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing Rust codebases Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in system and data behavior — then implement scalable, production-ready fixes Collaborate closely with research and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows Lead synchronous system design reviews and contribute architectural decisions that raise the bar across the codebase Who You Are Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust, with a strong focus on system architecture and API design Deep expertise in FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and unsafe Rust boundaries to optimize cross-language interactions Advanced understanding of asynchronous runtimes and thread safety in complex, multi-threaded environments A systems thinker who can lead technical discussions and drive architectural decisions with confidence Able to commit 20–40 hours per week consistently 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 Why Join Us Work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure alongside top research labs and engineering teams Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinking Freelance autonomy with the depth and impact of meaningful, high-stakes engineering work Tackle genuinely hard systems problems that matter — your work directly influences how the world's most advanced AI models are built Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch