Open Source Contributor – Rust

Remote · Flexible Hours · Mid-Senior Level

🌍 Remote Flexible Hours Mid-Senior Infrastructure & DevOps
About This Role
Mercor is seeking experienced Rust developers with a proven record of open-source contributions to join a high-quality, global network of engineers supporting AI, data, and high-performance infrastructure projects.

This opportunity is designed for developers who are deeply engaged in the open-source ecosystem and have a passion for systems programming, performance, safety, and reliability.

Key Responsibilities

  • Design challenging coding problems with clear input/output specs, constraints, and explicit function signatures.
  • Develop complete mini-repos, including:
- Problem statement - Reference solution - Comprehensive unit tests (10–20 cases) - Executable test runner
  • Implement clean, production-quality Rust code aligned strictly with test expectations.
  • Write high-coverage tests covering edge cases, invalid inputs, concurrency issues, and performance constraints.
  • Ensure full executability with no missing dependencies, borrow checker violations, or build configuration issues.

Requirements

  • 3–6 years of professional software development experience, with strong experience in Rust
  • Strong proficiency in Rust fundamentals, including ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, and trait-based design
  • Experience building backend services using frameworks such as Actix Web, Axum, Rocket, or similar
  • Working knowledge of async programming (Tokio, async/await)
  • Experience with databases: PostgreSQL / MySQL / MongoDB
  • Experience writing unit and integration tests using Rust’s built-in testing framework
  • Familiarity with Cargo, Docker, and basic CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions or similar)
  • Strong understanding of memory safety, concurrency models, and performance optimisation
  • Comfortable working with Git-based collaboration (PRs, issues, reviews)

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Role Details

  • High-impact contributions to globally visible infrastructure and systems projects
  • Part-time / Contract (10–20 hours per week)

Interview Prep Guide

EXCLUSIVE

Many top hiring platforms use AI-powered screening as the first step. Here's how to stand out when applying for a Open Source Contributor – Rust role:

Reliability Engineering: Discuss your approach to building resilient systems — monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post-mortems. Real examples are powerful.

Automation Mindset: Show how you've eliminated manual processes through infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing.

Cost Optimization: Be ready to discuss how you balance performance, reliability, and cost. Cloud economics knowledge is increasingly valued.

Practice Behavioral Question

"Walk me through a project where you had to learn a new domain quickly. How did you ramp up, and what would you do differently?"