Rust Developer / Expert Rust Developer
Loci·Senior·On-site · New York City Metropolitan Area·$180k–$200k USD
Posted Oct 6, 2026·askloci.ai
About the Company
Loci builds great products and systems to enable consumers and businesses to benefit from local AI (on-device inference). Check out some of our early offerings at askloci.ai. We believe strongly in offering private, low-cost, and easy to use AI to our users.
We’re looking for an expert Rust developer to help build an AI application that gives users control over their models, tools, and data. The work spans local inference, agent workflows, persistent memory, retrieval, and the infrastructure that supports development and delivery.
About the Role
You’ll own problems from investigation through implementation and operation. That means writing excellent code, making sound architectural decisions, and organizing information so other people can understand, maintain, and extend what you build.
Responsibilities
- Build reliable, maintainable Rust software, using the type system to make invalid states and common errors difficult to express.
- Experiment with AI models, inference engines, tool use, retrieval, and agent workflows, then turn useful experiments into dependable features.
- Build and maintain Kubernetes environments and Configuration as Code (CasC), with reproducible deployments and clear operational practices.
- Structure code, documentation, architecture, and tickets so that responsibilities, dependencies, and next steps are easy to understand.
- Turn requirements into focused work, explain tradeoffs, and carry changes through testing and delivery.
- Communicate progress, risks, and decisions clearly, and raise blockers early.
- Discuss work before you execute it, and validate your own changes before merge.
Qualifications
- Independent engineering ability. You must be able to design, write, debug, and test software when cloud AI providers or coding assistants are unavailable. AI tools can accelerate your work; your ability to deliver must remain dependable during an outage.
- Ability to lead others as the team grows. Scoping out tasks for mid-level and junior engineers.
Required Skills
- Expert knowledge of Rust, including ownership, lifetimes, traits, async, concurrency, error handling, FFIs, and performance.
- Hands-on experience hacking on AI projects: building, integrating, debugging, and evaluating systems beyond basic API calls.
- Practical experience with Kubernetes, CasC, CI/CD, and diagnosing failures across application and infrastructure boundaries.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including clear technical explanations, useful code reviews, and actionable tickets.
- Strong judgment about how to organize information: meaningful abstractions, clear module boundaries, discoverable documentation, and well-scoped work.
- The initiative to investigate unfamiliar problems, make justified decisions, and finish work without constant direction.
Preferred Skills
- You value privacy as a design requirement. You care about giving users control over their data and making deliberate choices about what a system stores, shares, and exposes.
- You’re self-driven. You identify what needs attention, investigate unfamiliar problems, and take work through to completion without waiting for detailed instructions.
- You exercise independent judgment, explain your reasoning, and ask for input when it matters. You keep others informed without needing someone to manage every step.
- You bring order to complexity. You leave code, documentation, architecture, and tickets better than you found them.
- You're passionate about self-sovereign on-device AI.
- We value evidence of how you think and build. Be ready to discuss a Rust system you’ve owned, an AI experiment you took beyond a demo, and a situation where your organization and communication made a complex project easier to deliver.
Pay Range and Compensation Package
180-200k base with variable equity. Ideal candidate prefers more equity than base.
