[Hiring] Senior Full Stack Rust Engineer @DEPT®

Role Description

We are seeking a Full Stack Rust Engineer to join the team as a hands-on contributor building and maintaining production Rust applications. This role spans backend systems engineering, database query development, and frontend contribution — with the center of gravity firmly on backend Rust development in a distributed, containerized environment. This is a build-and-ship role. The successful candidate writes production Rust, debugs production Rust, and owns the quality and performance of the systems they deliver.

• Design, develop, and maintain production Rust applications, including backend services, APIs, and system-level components
• Write and optimize complex SQL queries for performance and correctness at scale
• Debug and troubleshoot Rust applications in production environments, including memory safety issues, concurrency bugs, and performance regressions
• Contribute to frontend development using React where needed, including integration with micro frontend architectures
• Participate in the design and implementation of microservice and distributed system architectures
• Write and maintain comprehensive test suites: unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests following established best practices
• Deploy, monitor, and maintain services in containerized Kubernetes environments
• Implement and maintain observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and alerting for mission-critical distributed systems
• Communicate technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to team members at all levels
• Mentor junior engineers on Rust best practices, systems design, and production engineering discipline
• Leverage agentic coding assistive tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude CLI) responsibly to accelerate development while maintaining code quality and security standards

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience creating and managing Rust applications in production environments
• Strong command of Rust's ownership model, lifetime system, trait system, and error handling patterns
• Experience with the async Rust ecosystem (Tokio, async-std, or equivalent runtimes)
• Proficiency with common Rust web frameworks and libraries (Actix, Axum, Warp, or equivalent)
• Demonstrated ability to debug Rust applications in production: diagnosing panics, memory issues, deadlocks, and performance bottlenecks
• Strong systems/backend engineering experience in a production setting — this is not a prototyping or research role
• Experience designing and building APIs, background workers, data pipelines, or other backend services that run reliably at scale
• SQL and Data Strong experience creating scalable and efficient SQL queries, including complex joins, window functions, indexing strategy, and query plan analysis
• Experience working with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or equivalent) in production
• Familiarity with testing best practices in Rust and broader software engineering
• Experience writing and maintaining unit tests, integration tests, and ideally property-based or fuzz tests
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and how testing fits into a production deployment workflow
• Knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized environments: deploying, scaling, and troubleshooting services running in containers
• Experience with observability and alerting in mission-critical distributed systems: structured logging, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or equivalent), metrics (Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent), and alerting configuration
• Ability to communicate effectively with team members at all levels — engineers, product managers, and leadership
• Willingness and ability to mentor junior engineers: code review, pair programming, and knowledge sharing on Rust and systems engineering topics

Requirements

• Rate is up to $87 hourly on a Fixed Term, W2 Contract.
• Contracts are evaluated quarterly, or every three months, for this project, and will likely extend.
• This is based on a 40-hour workweek and leveling.
• Keep in mind, we're flexible.

Benefits

• DEPT® is an equal opportunity employer (EOE).
• We believe our work is its best when our people feel safe and free to be themselves.
• We’re committed to an inclusive and barrier-free recruitment and selection process and workplace.