Rust Engineer

LiteLLM - Rust Engineer (Founding Rust Engineer)

Role: Rust Engineer

Salary

• Up to $260,000 base
• 0.1-0.3% equity

Benefits

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental & Vision
• 401(k) with company match
• Breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee provided daily
• Onsite perks and collaborative engineering environment

Location

• Onsite - San Francisco (North Beach)
• 5 days/week in office
• ~60 hour/week culture (weekend work optional but common)

Reporting Into

• Ishaan (CTO & Co-Founder)
• Extremely high visibility role working directly with company leadership

The Sell (Company)

• LiteLLM is one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure companies, generating approximately $15M ARR with strong month-over-month growth.
• Trusted by companies including NVIDIA, Adobe, OpenAI, Netflix, and NASA.
• LiteLLM powers one of the world's most widely adopted AI gateways, allowing developers to seamlessly route requests across 100+ LLM providers through a single API.
• The company is making a major architectural investment by migrating its core platform from Python to Rust, creating a rare opportunity to define the technical direction of the engineering organization.
• Ideal opportunity for engineers looking for significant ownership, technical influence, and visible impact.

Engineering Culture

• Lean engineering team of approximately 6 engineers
• Mix of senior engineers from companies including Amazon, Cisco and Scale AI alongside a few junior engineers
• Fast-paced, high ownership environment
• Engineers are expected to work closely with leadership and move quickly
• Customer empathy is highly valued-engineers regularly think about user experience and product impact
• This is the company's first dedicated Rust hire, making this engineer the internal Rust subject matter expert

The Role

• Pure Individual Contributor position
• Own the migration of LiteLLM's core platform from Python to Rust
• Define Rust best practices and help establish the company's long-term Rust engineering culture
• Partner directly with the CTO on architectural decisions
• Optimize latency, throughput and overall gateway performance
• Help shape future Rust hiring as the company expands

Technical Requirements

• 3-5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• 1-3+ years of production Rust experience
• Strong systems programming fundamentals
• Experience improving latency, throughput and application performance
• Experience building scalable backend or distributed systems
• Ability to complete technical interviews and coding exercises without AI assistance

Nice-to-Haves

• Previous language migration experience (especially Go ? Rust or Python ? Rust)
• AI infrastructure experience
• Customer-facing engineering experience
• Strong academic background (CMU, MIT, Georgia Tech, etc.)
• Senior or Staff-level ownership experience

Ideal Backgrounds

• Amazon
• Cloudflare
• Uber
• Dropbox
• Stripe
• Scale AI
• Perplexity
• Cognition

Crypto backgrounds are welcomed if candidates have strong systems and performance engineering experience.

Screening Priorities

The top priorities are:

• Strong Rust fundamentals
• Performance engineering (latency, throughput, systems optimization)
• Customer obsession

Helpful screening questions:

• What product have you worked on that customers loved?
• What feedback did customers have?
• Have you optimized systems for latency or throughput?
• Have you led or contributed to a language migration?
• Can you comfortably code in Rust without AI assistance?

Interview Process

1. LHi Recruiter Screen

• Background
• Rust experience
• Performance engineering
• Motivation

2. Intro with CTO

• Technical background
• Product ownership
• Culture fit

3. Technical Interview

• Rust coding exercise
• Whiteboarding
• System design
• Must complete coding without AI

4. Final Onsite

• Meet engineering team
• Leadership discussions
• Final evaluation

Hiring Notes

• Mission-critical hire
• Highest engineering priority for the company
• Looking to hire immediately
• Target start by end of July
• 24-48 hour interview turnaround
• Company expects to hire approximately 8 engineers per month