Principal Rust Software Engineer (AI)

Job Type: Full Time
Job Location: United States
Company Name: Spice AI

Company Overview

Building intelligent apps that leverage AI is still way too hard, even for advanced developers. Our mission is to make this as easy as creating a modern web page. Spice AI provides the fastest, easiest, and smartest way to access and leverage web3 data. Designed for applications and machine learning, we remove the complexity of building and operating massive data infrastructure – enabling teams to create the next generation of data and AI-driven apps. The next generation of AI-driven applications will have a profoundly positive impact on the way we all live. Spice AI is enabling and accelerating their creation. From health and longevity to security for all, Spice-powered apps will enrich the lives of everyone, everywhere.

About the job

Building data-driven AI applications and agents is too complex, even for advanced developers. At Spice AI, we’re making it simpler by helping developers combine code, data, and AI to build truly intelligent, decision-making systems. Our mission is to make this as easy as creating a modern web page.

We created Spice.ai OSS, a portable AI database written in Rust with a unified SQL interface to query, materialize, and accelerate data from any source, co-located with machine learning models. By bringing compute, data, and models together, Spice OSS enables secure AI-Feedback-Loops (AI-Fly-Wheels) for apps and agents to learn and adapt.

For a deeper dive into the vision, watch Luke’s CMU Databases talk on Spice.ai OSS at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyM-ec1lKfU and read his Materialized View interview at https://materializedview.io/p/building-a-cdn-for-databases-spice-ai.

We’re also building the Spice.ai Cloud Platform, offering managed, cloud-scale Spice.ai OSS along with tools for high-performance SQL, machine learning training, and inference in an interconnected AI backend-as-a-service.

At Spice AI, we hire for MEI: Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. We’re looking for exceptional, top-tier engineers – A players – who are driven to solve hard problems and push the boundaries of what’s possible for AI.

We’re looking for a Principal Rust Software Engineer to contribute to ML, GenAI, RAG, and agent development in Spice.ai OSS. In this role, you’ll design and build high-performance AI features in Spice.ai, libraries like mistral-rs, and enterprise solutions including NVidia NIM (Spice AI was recently accepted into the NVidia Inception program).

If you’re passionate about open source, distributed systems, RAG and AI internals, and agentic applications we want to hear from you.

Who we are looking for

  • You are an exceptional engineer.
  • You are a problem solver. You start customer problems and figure out how to solve them with technology.
  • You think differently. You do not accept the status-quo. You challenge the current model of the world and take leaps of faith to build it better for everyone.
  • You are positive. Instead of focusing on limitations, you ask what’s possible.
  • You care about meaningful work. Your work is more than a job.
  • You are comfortable with ambiguity and unknowns, and in these situations, you lead by creating clarity.
  • You are passionate about high performance and have high standards.

What we’re looking for

  • 2+ years professional Rust experience or 5+ yrs professional C/C++ experience
  • Experience in designing, implementing, scaling, and shipping production distributed, data, and AI systems.
  • A track record of strong design, architectural, engineering, and product decisions.
  • Excellent communication skills.
  • Ability to ramp up quickly and hit the ground running.
  • Ideally, experience contributing to open-source projects.
  • Experience with Apache infra, CNCF-stack, or cloud-native development, and ideally with Rust/Golang.

In this role, you’ll

  • Work side-by-side with the founders as a leader and outstanding contributor in the Spice.ai open-source project.
  • Contribute to designing and building the Spice.ai Cloud Platform, and data platforms.
  • Take ownership of initiatives to improve our offerings and deliver exceptional developer experiences.

Your first 90-days

  • Your first month – ramp up and contribute meaningful improvements to the Spice.ai OSS project
  • 30-60 days – take technical and engineering ownership of an entire feature area
  • 60-90 days – propose and execute on aligned technical strategy going forward

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