About the Role

The Principal Rust Engineer will lead a major platform performance initiative for an AI infrastructure company, focusing on enhancing the backend system's architecture for improved performance. This role involves making critical technical decisions and collaborating with senior leadership to ensure the system meets high standards of reliability and scalability.

What You’ll Do

Own a major architectural transformation across a high-volume AI infrastructure platform.
Work directly with senior technical leadership to define the architecture and implementation strategy.
Restructure existing systems to support long-term performance and engineering velocity.
Lead the gradual introduction of Rust into a mature production codebase.
Identify and remove bottlenecks across latency, throughput and resource utilisation.
Design systems capable of handling significant production traffic while maintaining reliability.
Develop a phased rollout strategy that minimises risk to existing customers and workloads.
Make key architectural decisions around performance, scalability, reliability and maintainability.
Work closely with backend and infrastructure engineers to ensure changes align with wider platform priorities.
Measure the impact of architectural changes through meaningful production performance metrics.

Who We’re Looking For

Deep, production-level Rust experience with several years of hands-on development.
Strong understanding of performance engineering, particularly latency, throughput and resource efficiency.
Experience building and operating high-volume production backend or infrastructure systems.
Strong systems thinking and the ability to make pragmatic trade-offs between performance, reliability and complexity.
Experience owning technically complex projects from architecture through to production.
Comfortable working with backend infrastructure and databases such as PostgreSQL and Redis.

Bonus Points

Experience migrating or rewriting production systems into Rust.
Background in performance-critical, distributed or low-latency systems.
Experience working on AI infrastructure, developer platforms or high-throughput APIs.

Interested?

Apply today!

Requirements

Rust experience

Deep, production-level Rust experience with several years of hands-on development.

Performance engineering

Strong understanding of performance engineering, particularly latency, throughput and resource efficiency.

High-volume systems

Experience building and operating high-volume production backend or infrastructure systems.

Systems thinking

Strong systems thinking and the ability to make pragmatic trade-offs between performance, reliability and complexity.

Project ownership

Experience owning technically complex projects from architecture through to production.

Nice to Have

Migration experience

Experience migrating or rewriting production systems into Rust.

Distributed systems

Background in performance-critical, distributed or low-latency systems.

AI infrastructure

Experience working on AI infrastructure, developer platforms or high-throughput APIs.