Principal Rust Engineer - ML Infrastructure

Principal Rust Engineer - ML Infrastructure (AI Training)

About the Role

What if your deep expertise in Rust could directly shape the infrastructure powering some of the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to design and build the high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation infrastructure that leading AI labs depend on to train and refine next-generation models.

This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for a seasoned Rust engineer who thrives on hard systems problems and wants their work to matter at scale.

Organization

: Alignerr

Type

: Hourly Contract

Location

: Remote

Commitment

: 20-40 hours/week

What You'll Do Design, build, and optimize high-performance Rust systems that power AI data pipelines and model evaluation workflows

Develop full-stack backend tooling and services for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control

Improve reliability, performance, and safety across production Rust codebases

Collaborate closely with data, research, and engineering teams to accelerate model training and evaluation

Identify and resolve bottlenecks and edge cases in data flow and system behavior

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 Rust for data-intensive applications

Deep understanding of memory management and zero-copy deserialization with minimal runtime overhead

Proven experience integrating Rust with machine learning frameworks or columnar data standards to support model training workflows

Able to commit 20-40 hours per week with consistency and reliability

Self-directed and comfortable operating in fast-moving, research-adjacent environments

Nice to Have Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or model evaluation systems

Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training pipelines, or benchmarking infrastructure

Experience building distributed systems or developer tooling at scale

Why Join Us Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs

Fully remote and async-friendly - work when and where it suits you

Freelance autonomy paired with high-impact, technically demanding work

Contribute directly to the infrastructure that makes next-generation AI possible

Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch