Systems Programmer - AI Data Pipelines

Systems Programmer — AI Data Pipelines About The Role What if your Rust expertise could directly shape the infrastructure behind the world's most advanced AI systems? We're looking for a senior Rust engineer to design and build the high-performance data pipelines, annotation tooling, and evaluation systems that leading AI labs depend on to train and improve their models. This is a fully remote contract role working on real production systems — not toy projects. You'll collaborate with research and engineering teams at the frontier of AI development, solving hard systems problems that matter. 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 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 production Rust codebases Identify bottlenecks and edge cases in data and system behavior — then implement scalable, robust fixes Collaborate with data, research, and engineering teams to support model training and evaluation workflows Participate in synchronous design and code reviews to iterate on architecture and implementation decisions Who You Are Native or fluent English speaker with strong written and verbal communication skills 3–5+ years of professional experience writing production Rust Deep command of Rust lifetimes, ownership mechanics, and idiomatic error handling patterns Proven experience building I/O-bound data pipelines with robust retry and backoff logic Able to commit 20–40 hours per week with reliable availability for collaboration Self-directed and effective working independently in a remote environment Nice to Have Prior experience with data annotation, data quality, or evaluation systems Familiarity with AI/ML workflows, model training, or benchmarking pipelines Experience with distributed systems or developer tooling Background in systems programming, infrastructure engineering, or platform work Why Join Us Work directly with leading AI labs on production systems at the frontier of AI research Fully remote and flexible — structure your week around the work, not the other way around Freelance autonomy paired with meaningful, high-impact engineering challenges Build systems that have a direct, measurable influence on how next-generation AI models are trained and evaluated Potential for ongoing work and contract extension as new projects launch Apply tot his job Apply To this Job