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Senior Full Stack Rust Engineer, Contract - US
DEPT·Mid-level·Remote · United States
Posted Aug 16, 2026·deptagency.com
Role: Senior Full Stack Rust Engineer
Company: DEPT®
Engagement Type: Fixed Term, W2 Contract (Evaluated quarterly / every 3 months; 40-hour workweek)
Location: Remote (United States)
Company Overview & Facts
- Global digital agency across 30+ locations in 20+ countries with 2,500+ digital specialists.
- B Corp-certified company.
- Client portfolio includes Google, KFC, Philips, Audi, Twitch, Patagonia, eBay, and others.
Role Overview
- Hands-on contributor building and maintaining production Rust applications.
- Scope spans backend systems engineering, database query development, and frontend contribution, with focus on backend Rust development in a distributed, containerized environment.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
Rust & Systems Engineering:
- 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.
- Experience designing and building APIs, background workers, data pipelines, or other backend services that run reliably at scale.
Databases & SQL:
- 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.
Testing, DevOps & Observability:
- Familiarity with testing best practices in Rust and broader software engineering.
- Experience writing and maintaining unit tests, integration tests, and 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.
Collaboration & Mentorship:
- Ability to communicate effectively with team members at all levels (engineers, product managers, leadership).
- Willingness and ability to mentor junior engineers: code review, pair programming, and knowledge sharing on Rust and systems engineering topics.
Compensation
- Rate: Up to $87/hr
- Terms: Fixed Term, W2 Contract (Evaluated quarterly / every 3 months; based on a 40-hour workweek and leveling).
Additional Notes & Policies
- E-Verify: DEPT® participates in E-Verify; Form I-9 information is verified with the federal government to confirm U.S. work authorization.
- Equal Opportunity: Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE).
