Senior Rust Engineer (Contract to Hire)

Position: Sr. Rust Engineer
Location: Hollywood, LA
Duration: 6 Months(Contract to Hire)

About R Systems:
R Systems is a leading digital product engineering company that designs and develops chip-to-cloud software products, platforms, and digital experiences that empower its clients to achieve higher revenues and operational efficiency. Our product mindset and engineering capabilities in Cloud, Data, AI, and CX enable us to serve key players in the high-tech industry, including ISVs, SaaS, and Internet companies, as well as product companies in telecom, media, finance, manufacturing, and health verticals. We Are Great Place to Work Certified in 10 countries with a full-time workforce [India, USA, Canada, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia & Thailand]! We are recognized as one of the Best Tech Brands 2024 by the Times Group and India's Top 500 Value Creators 2023 by Dun & Bradstreet.

Job Requirement: What you'll do

• Design, build, and ship production Rust services end-to-end from Postgres schema and migrations up through GraphQL and gRPC APIs for tens of thousands of users, with care for backwards compatibility and gated rollout of behavior changes.
• Own features in our cloud GraphQL API: async-graphql schema and resolvers, sqlx queries and migrations (raw, compile-checked SQL no ORM), relationship-based authorization (Ory Keto), search (Meilisearch), and messaging (NATS/JetStream).
• Build and evolve async, concurrent systems with Tokio services, background workers, and streaming APIs that stay correct under load and observable in production.
• Work across gRPC / Protobuf service boundaries (Tonic/Prost), treating published surfaces as backwards-compatibility contracts.
• Contribute to shared foundational crates with wide blast radius, keeping changes narrow and well-tested.
• Extend Strada's peer-to-peer architecture iroh/QUIC transport, WebRTC signaling, TURN, NAT traversal where media transfers directly between machines.
• Depending on your interests and the team's needs, go deep on the GStreamer media pipeline (custom elements, pro codecs, low-latency streaming) or the cloud and data plane (API, storage, search, auth).
• Instrument everything (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Prometheus) and take part in CI/CD on AWS EKS (Terraform/Terragrunt, GitHub Actions).

What you bring
Must-have (core, non-negotiable)

• Strong production Rust ownership, borrowing and lifetimes, traits, error handling, and a type system used well.
• Solid async Rust (Tokio or equivalent): tasks, channels, streams, cancellation, and reasoning clearly about concurrency correctness.
• Experience designing and operating backend services and their APIs (HTTP / GraphQL / gRPC).
• Production experience with relational databases and SQL (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design and migrations comfortable with raw SQL, not just an ORM.
• A solid grasp of auth fundamentals OAuth2 / JWT, and RBAC or relationship-based access control.
• At home in a command-line, cloud-native workflow (Docker, CI/CD, some cloud infrastructure exposure), collaborating and reviewing code in a sizable codebase.

Where you could make a big impact
These are areas you can own and go deep on any one is a way to have outsized impact, and a couple can be a specialty in their own right.

• Real-time and networking systems WebRTC (SDP/ICE/TURN), QUIC, NAT traversal, or libraries like iroh.
• Media and streaming GStreamer, professional video codecs (ProRes, RED R3D, Blackmagic RAW), AVFoundation / VideoToolbox, low-latency pipelines.
• Systems-level / OS work daemons and background services (launchd / Windows services), Unix domain sockets and named pipes, virtual filesystems (NFS / FSKit / WinFsp), caching, and content addressing.

Nice to have / bonus

• gRPC / Protobuf on the Rust stack (Tonic/Prost), with schema-evolution and backwards-compat discipline.
• async-graphql or other production GraphQL server experience.
• sqlx specifically (compile-time-checked queries, offline mode) and Postgres performance tuning.
• Ory (Keto/Oathkeeper) or other Zanzibar-style authorization; Auth0.
• Cloud-native ops AWS (EKS, ECR, S3), Kubernetes, Terraform/Terragrunt, NATS, Meilisearch.
• Cross-language FFI (swift-bridge, Rust Swift/TS bindings) handy, since our clients embed Rust.
• Nix/devenv reproducible environments and just-based task runners.
• Observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, PrometheGrafana/Tempo).
• A background in film, video, or post-production, or other professional media workflows.

Why Join R Systems?

• Frequent Internal Hackathons: Engage in dynamic competitions with exciting prizes to keep your skills sharp.
• Cultural Celebrations: Strengthen our familial bonds through shared celebrations, fostering a sense of community.
• Diverse Project Exposure: Work on a variety of projects across sectors like Healthcare, Banking, e-commerce, and Retail, collaborating with leading global brands.
• Centre of Excellence (COE): Benefit from technical guidance and upskilling opportunities provided by our team of technology experts, helping you navigate your career path.
• E-Learning Platform: Gain access to comprehensive e-learning platforms coupled with a robust mentorship program to enhance your skills.
• Open Door Policy: Embrace a culture of mutual support, respect, and open dialogue, promoting a collaborative work environment.

If you are passionate and excited about working in a fast-paced, innovative environment, we would love to hear from you!
R Systems is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate against any employee or job applicant because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, physical or mental disability, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. We strive to build a team that reflects the diverse communities we serve, and we actively encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds and experiences. Our commitment to equal opportunity extends to all aspects of employment, including recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, and benefits.
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