Senior Rust Engineer - W2 Contract

Job Role: Sr. Rust Engineer

Location: Los Angeles, CA (Onsite Work)

Duration: Long Term Contract

Responsibilities

·       Design, build, and ship production Rust services end-to-end — from Postgres schema and migrations up through GraphQL and gRPC APIs — for tens of thousands of users, with care for backwards compatibility and gated rollout of behaviour changes.

·       Own features in our cloud GraphQL API: async-graphql schema and resolvers, sqlx queries and migrations (raw, compile-checked SQL — no ORM), relationship-based authorization (Ory Keto), search (Meilisearch), and messaging (NATS/JetStream).

·       Build and evolve async, concurrent systems with Tokio — services, background workers, and streaming APIs — that stay correct under load and observable in production.

·       Work across gRPC / Protobuf service boundaries (Tonic/Prost), treating published surfaces as backwards-compatibility contracts.

·       Contribute to shared foundational crates with wide blast radius, keeping changes narrow and well-tested.

·       Extend Strada's peer-to-peer architecture — iroh/QUIC transport, WebRTC signaling, TURN, NAT traversal — where media transfers directly between machines.

·       Depending on your interests and the team's needs, go deep on the GStreamer media pipeline (custom elements, pro codecs, low-latency streaming) or the cloud and data plane (API, storage, search, auth).

·       Instrument everything (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Prometheus) and take part in CI/CD on AWS EKS (Terraform/Terragrunt, GitHub Actions).

Must-have (core, non-negotiable)

·       Strong production Rust — ownership, borrowing and lifetimes, traits, error handling, and a type system used well.

·       Solid async Rust (Tokio or equivalent): tasks, channels, streams, cancellation, and reasoning clearly about concurrency correctness.

·       Experience designing and operating backend services and their APIs (HTTP / GraphQL / gRPC).

·       Production experience with relational databases and SQL (PostgreSQL preferred), including schema design and migrations — comfortable with raw SQL, not just an ORM.

·       A solid grasp of auth fundamentals — OAuth2 / JWT, and RBAC or relationship-based access control.

·       At home in a command-line, cloud-native workflow (Docker, CI/CD, some cloud infrastructure exposure), collaborating and reviewing code in a sizable codebase.

Where you could make a big impact:

·       These are areas you can own and go deep on — any one is a way to have outsized impact, and a couple can be a specialty in their own right.

·       Real-time and networking systems — WebRTC (SDP/ICE/TURN), QUIC, NAT traversal, or libraries like iroh.

·       Media and streaming — GStreamer, professional video codecs (ProRes, RED R3D, Blackmagic RAW), AVFoundation / VideoToolbox, low-latency pipelines.

·       Systems-level / OS work — daemons and background services (launchd / Windows services), Unix domain sockets and named pipes, virtual filesystems (NFS / FSKit / WinFsp), caching, and content addressing.

Nice to have / bonus:

·       gRPC / Protobuf on the Rust stack (Tonic/Prost), with schema-evolution and backwards-compat discipline.

·       async-graphql or other production GraphQL server experience.

·       sqlx specifically (compile-time-checked queries, offline mode) and Postgres performance tuning.

·       Ory (Keto/Oathkeeper) or other Zanzibar-style authorization; Auth0.

·       Cloud-native ops — AWS (EKS, ECR, S3), Kubernetes, Terraform/Terragrunt, NATS, Meilisearch.

·       Cross-language FFI (swift-bridge, Rust ꠓwift/TS bindings) — handy, since our clients embed Rust.

·       Nix/devenv reproducible environments and just-based task runners.

·       Observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Datadog, PrometheGrafana/Tempo).

·       A background in film, video, or post-production, or other professional media workflows.