Backend & Tooling Engineer (Rust)

About The Role
What if your Rust expertise 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 that leading AI labs depend on — from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation frameworks that influence how frontier models are trained and measured.
This is a fully remote contract role working on real production systems at the cutting edge of AI development. If you care deeply about performance, correctness, and building tools that engineers actually love using, this is the role for you.
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 backend services and CLI tooling for 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 infrastructure
Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior, and implement scalable, production-ready fixes
Participate in synchronous design reviews to iterate on system 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 ability to build high-performance backend web services and robust, user-friendly CLI tools
Experienced with type-safe database interactions and connection pooling for large-scale data workloads
Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliability and consistency
Self-directed and comfortable working asynchronously across distributed teams
Nice to Have
Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or model evaluation systems
Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking infrastructure
Experience with distributed systems architecture or developer-facing tooling
Background in performance profiling and systems-level optimization
Why Join Us
Work directly with leading AI labs on systems that matter — this is real infrastructure, not toy projects
Fully remote and flexible — work from anywhere on a schedule that fits your life
Freelance autonomy with the structure and engagement of meaningful, high-impact engineering work
Collaborate with sharp, mission-driven engineers and researchers at the frontier of AI development
Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as projects scale and evolve

Work arrangement
Yes