Rustification Engineer

Job Description

The Rust / Rustification Engineer will drive production-scale memory optimization and service modernization initiatives across complex distributed systems. This role is responsible for analyzing target service architectures, establishing reliable baselines, executing optimization experiments, validating measurable savings, and supporting safe production deployment of approved changes. The engineer will work with high autonomy while collaborating closely with RFM technical leadership, service owners, and engineering stakeholders to deliver realized memory reduction and repeatable guidance for scaled execution.

Core Expertise required

• End-to-end production Rust (ownership/borrowing, async/Tokio); rebuilding memory-bound Java/JVM services as memory-safe Rust to remove GC/heap/JIT overhead; proving functional equivalence and driving safe cutover; target stack: Smithy Rust Server SDK, ECS Fargate (ARM64/Graviton), CargoBrazil, CDK; comfortable driving AI coding agents as the primary workflow.

Key Responsibilities

• Analyze target service architectures and usage patterns to identify memory consumption drivers and establish reliable footprint baselines.
• Finalize testing strategies and evaluate candidate tooling for the assigned service archetype, documenting what works, what does not, and why.
• Execute optimization testing using selected tools under production-representative traffic in pre-production environments.
• Validate optimization results against baselines and produce final recommendations with quantified memory and cost-saving estimates.
• Obtain descaling sign-off from service owners and create deployment strategies, including change plans, MCMs, phased rollout approaches, and rollback plans.
• Support and execute production deployments while ensuring no degradation to performance, throughput, availability, or service-level objectives.
• Extract and document learnings at every milestone, including optimization patterns, tool effectiveness, reproducible steps, and troubleshooting guidance.
• Produce documentation that is consumable by both human engineers and AI agents, including runbooks, SOPs, specifications, and reusable execution playbooks.
• Take on additional services as accelerator tooling and runbooks mature, helping compress cycle times for repeated service archetypes.

Candidate Requirements

• Deep, hands-on production experience in one or more target ecosystems: Rust/Rustification, EKS cluster operations, JDK migration and heap tuning, EMR/Spark SQL query optimization, or EMR/Spark infrastructure and memory optimization.
• Demonstrated ability to own end-to-end technical investigations from hypothesis development through experimentation, measurement, validation, recommendation, and deployment support.
• Experience producing high-quality technical documentation, including runbooks, standard operating procedures, design specifications, and implementation guidance.
• Strong stakeholder communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across service teams, engineering leadership, and technical reviewers.
• Comfort operating with high autonomy in complex, production-scale environments where ambiguity, service diversity, and operational constraints must be managed effectively.