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 lead the systems that sit at the heart of real AI production workflows — from high-throughput data pipelines to evaluation infrastructure used by leading AI labs. This isn't a sandbox project. You'll be working on real, high-impact systems that researchers and engineers depend on every day. Organization: Alignerr Type: Hourly Contract Location: Remote Commitment: 20–40 hours/week What You'll Do Design and build high-performance, production-grade systems in Rust that power AI data pipelines and model evaluation workflows Develop full-stack backend services and tooling for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control Improve reliability, safety, and performance across existing Rust codebases — finding and fixing bottlenecks before they become problems Collaborate closely with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation at scale Identify edge cases and systemic failure points in data and system behavior, then implement scalable, lasting fixes Lead synchronous design reviews, contributing architectural vision and driving implementation decisions Who You Are Native or fluent English speaker with clear written and verbal communication skills 5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust, with strong focus on system architecture and API design Deep expertise in FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and unsafe Rust — you know where the boundaries are and how to work them effectively Advanced knowledge of asynchronous runtimes and multi-threaded environments — thread safety isn't an afterthought for you Able to lead system design reviews and communicate technical decisions clearly to cross-functional teams Available to commit 20–40 hours per week on a contract basis 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 at scale Why Join Us Work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure alongside leading research labs — this is real production work, not toy projects Fully remote and async-friendly — work from wherever you do your best thinking Freelance autonomy with the structure and impact of meaningful, high-stakes engineering work Collaborate with a network of top engineers and researchers pushing the frontier of AI development Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch