Principal Rust Engineer Fully Remote (East Coast US Preferred) The client is a well-funded seed-stage AI startup building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of AI applications. Backed by experienced founders and early investors, the company is tackling complex challenges around performance, scalability, and reliability, creating technology that enables AI systems to operate safely and efficiently at scale. As an early member of the engineering team, you'll have the opportunity to influence both the technical direction of the platform and the future growth of the business. The environment is highly collaborative, fast moving, and focused on engineering excellence, with significant ownership given to those who want to make an impact. What's on offer: • Fully remote working environment. • Opportunity to work directly with experienced founders and early engineering leaders. • Significant influence over architecture, technology choices, and engineering practices. • The chance to help shape a category defining product from an early stage. Key Responsibilities • Lead the design, development, and evolution of high performance systems in Rust. • Own critical platform components from architecture through deployment and ongoing optimisation. • Build scalable infrastructure and services capable of operating reliably under demanding workloads. • Design and implement efficient algorithms and data structures to solve complex engineering challenges. • Drive performance improvements through profiling, benchmarking, debugging, and optimisation. • Collaborate closely with engineers across the business to bring new capabilities into production. • Contribute to architectural decisions and help establish engineering best practices. • Provide technical leadership and mentorship across the engineering team. Qualifications • Minimum 3 years of Rust experience building production software. • Strong background in systems programming, infrastructure, distributed systems, or other performance sensitive applications. • Deep understanding of software architecture, algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and scalable system design. • Experience profiling, debugging, benchmarking, and optimising complex production systems. • Proven ability to lead technical projects and take ownership of critical engineering initiatives. • Comfortable operating in a fast paced startup environment with a high degree of autonomy. • Strong communication and collaboration skills.