Principal Rust Engineer - ML Infrastructure

Seattle

**Principal Rust Engineer --- ML Infrastructure (AI Training)** **About The Role** What if your deep mastery of Rust could directly shape the infrastructure that powers the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to build, optimize, and harden the high-performance systems that leading AI labs depend on --- from data pipelines and annotation tooling to evaluation frameworks that influence how next-generation models are trained. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for an experienced engineer who writes production-grade Rust and thrives at the intersection of systems programming and AI infrastructure. * 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 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 * Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing Rust codebases used in real AI production environments * Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows * Identify bottlenecks, edge cases, and systemic issues --- then implement scalable, elegant solutions * 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 or systems-level applications * Deep understanding of memory management, ownership semantics, and zero-copy deserialization with minimal runtime overhead * Experienced 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 working asynchronously across distributed teams **Nice to Have** * Prior experience with data annotation pipelines, data quality systems, or evaluation infrastructure * Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines * Background in distributed systems architecture or developer tooling * Experience working directly with AI research teams or in a fast-moving lab environment **Why Join Us** * Work on real production systems powering cutting-edge AI research at leading labs * Fully remote and flexible --- structure your hours around your life * Freelance autonomy with the substance of high-impact, technically challenging work * Collaborate with world-class engineers and researchers at the frontier of AI development * Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch