Systems Software Engineer - Machine Learning Ops

New York

**Systems Software Engineer --- Machine Learning Ops** **About The Role** What if your systems engineering skills could directly shape the infrastructure powering the world's most advanced AI models? We're looking for a senior C++ engineer to build and optimize the data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that leading AI labs depend on to train and ship next-generation models. This is a fully remote, flexible contract role for a seasoned engineer who knows C++ deeply and thrives working on high-impact, production-grade systems. If you've spent years writing performance-critical code and want to apply that expertise at the cutting edge of AI development, 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 C++ systems supporting AI data pipelines and evaluation workflows * Develop full-stack tooling and backend services for large-scale data annotation, validation, and quality control * Improve reliability, performance, and safety across existing C++ codebases used in production AI environments * Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows * Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior, and implement scalable, maintainable 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 * Full-stack developer with a strong systems programming background and deep C++ expertise * 5+ years of professional experience writing production C++ code * Experienced working with the C++ frontends of ML frameworks or inference runtimes * Familiar with hardware acceleration APIs for optimizing model inference * Able to commit 20--40 hours per week with consistency and reliability **Nice to Have** * Prior experience with data annotation, data quality pipelines, or evaluation systems * Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines * Experience with distributed systems design or developer tooling * Background in performance profiling, debugging, or systems reliability engineering **Why Join Us** * Work on real production systems used by leading AI research labs * Fully remote and flexible --- work when and where it suits you * Freelance autonomy with the structure of meaningful, impactful technical work * Contribute directly to infrastructure that shapes the future of AI development * Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch