Senior Rust Backend Engineer — Remote (Europe) + Equity

directus.com; United States; Remote; USD 104,000 - 173,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote (Europe)

Equity participation

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Directus is seeking a senior backend engineer to advance the core of a modular, self-hosted data platform used by developer teams in production. You will write in Rust, deliver features, and improve the developer experience in a remote-first setting.

You’ll collaborate with product and engineering partners to translate real user needs into production-ready designs, architectures, and robust APIs while maintaining speed and reliability across distributed systems.

Qualifications

• Substantial backend engineering experience with production work in Rust (3+ years).
• Strong foundations in concurrency, memory and performance trade-offs, distributed systems concepts, and API design.
• Proven track record designing evolvable, resilient architectures.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication.

Responsibilities

• Design and deliver product features and platform capabilities in Rust that lift the developer experience.
• Convert product needs into clear technical plans, shaping requirements, UX and API contracts, and iterating with product managers and designers.
• Construct maintainable service and domain architecture with strong test coverage and thoughtful abstractions.
• Take ownership end-to-end: design docs, implementation, reviews, testing, rollout, and iteration based on feedback.
• Operate within a remote-first team with clear written communication and asynchronous collaboration.
• Lift engineering standards through code quality and documentation.

Skills

Rust

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

API design

English communication

Job description

Directus is seeking a senior backend engineer to advance the core of a modular, self-hosted data platform used by developer teams in production. You will write in Rust, deliver features, and improve the developer experience in a remote-first setting.

You’ll collaborate with product and engineering partners to translate real user needs into production-ready designs, architectures, and robust APIs while maintaining speed and reliability across distributed systems.