Open Source Contributor – Rust at Mercor

Open Source Contributor – Rust | $50–$85/hr | Worldwide Remote

Mercor is looking for experienced Rust developers with a strong open-source background to join a global network of engineers contributing to AI, data, and high-performance infrastructure projects. This is a part-time contract role (10–20 hrs/week) ideal for systems programmers who care deeply about performance, safety, and reliability.

Key Responsibilities

• Design challenging coding problems with clear input/output specifications, constraints, and explicit function signatures.
• Develop complete mini-repos including problem statements, reference solutions, comprehensive unit tests (10–20 cases), and executable test runners.
• Implement clean, production-quality Rust code aligned strictly with test expectations.
• Write high-coverage tests addressing 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 Rust expertise.
• Deep proficiency in Rust fundamentals: ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, and trait-based design.
• Experience building backend services with frameworks such as Actix Web, Axum, or Rocket.
• Solid understanding of async programming using Tokio and async/await patterns.
• Experience with databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MongoDB.
• Proficiency writing unit and integration tests using Rust's built-in testing framework.
• Familiarity with Cargo, Docker, and CI/CD workflows (e.g., GitHub Actions).
• Strong grasp of memory safety, concurrency models, and performance optimization.
• Comfortable with Git-based collaboration including PRs, issues, and code reviews.

Role Details

• Contract / Part-Time: 10–20 hours per week
• High-impact contributions to globally visible infrastructure and systems projects
• Fully remote — work from anywhere in the world