Principal Rust Engineer

UMATR; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

UMATR is seeking a Principal Rust Engineer in San Francisco to own a major architecture transformation for a high-volume AI infrastructure platform. You’ll drive performance, reliability and maintainability while guiding a phased rollout and coordinating with backend and infra teams.

You will lead the introduction of Rust in a production codebase, optimize latency and throughput, and balance engineering velocity with stability at production scale.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Rust

Performance engineering

Backend systems

PostgreSQL

Redis

Distributed systems

Job description

We’re partnering with a fast-growing AI infrastructure company building the platform layer that helps engineering teams reliably connect applications with modern AI models and services.

They’re looking for a Principal Rust Engineer to take ownership of a major platform performance initiative. You’ll work closely with technical leadership to evolve a mature backend system towards a more performance-focused architecture, with a particular focus on latency, throughput, scalability and resource efficiency.

This is a high-ownership role where you’ll be responsible for some of the platform’s most important technical decisions. You’ll need to balance ambitious performance improvements with the reliability and stability expected from infrastructure running at significant production scale.

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.

Strongly preferred:

• 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.