Senior Rust Engineer

As a Senior Rust Developer, you will design and implement robust backend systems using gRPC, event sourcing, and actor-based concurrency while making critical architecture decisions to rapidly deliver features for an enterprise application built on Clean Architecture and CQRS patterns. If you are a self-motivated engineer looking to take ownership of your work, we invite you to join our team at NextLink Labs.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend services using Rust (Edition 2024) with Tokio as the async runtime
• Implement and extend Clean Architecture with CQRS and Event Sourcing patterns using actor-based concurrency (Kameo)
• Work with other engineers to architect and implement modular, well-structured solutions across workspace crates (model, domain, data, service)
• Communicate directly with clients to give demonstrations and receive feedback
• Build gRPC services using Tonic and Protocol Buffers with Prost for inter-service communication
• Build and optimize data access layers using SQLx against PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB and Neo4j
• Implement request validation using Garde
• Work in an agile team environment with daily stand ups, and weekly agile meetings
• Engage in code reviews of your teammates' work
• Triage, diagnose, and resolve production support tickets and defects in Rust-based microservices running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), owning the full lifecycle from root cause analysis through fix and deployment validation
• Contribute to observability and monitoring using Tracing, OpenTelemetry, and OLTP exporters

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience building backend services with Rust with 3+ years supporting and maintaining production microservices-based architectures
• Strong understanding of Clean Architecture, CQRS, Event Sourcing, and actor-based concurrency patterns
• Experience designing and implementing gRPC APIs with Tonic and Protocol Buffers
• Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB) and async query toolkits (SQLx)
• Experience with validation frameworks such as Garde
• Ability to work independently and take ownership in a variety of software engagements
• Ability to scope individual features and full software projects based on client requests
• Excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal skills with the ability to build buy-in, facilitate compromise, and guide client expectations
• Strong testing abilities using Cucumber (BDD/Gherkin) for integration tests and Rust's built-in test framework for unit tests
• Proficient understanding of version control systems (Git)
• Understanding of security best practices including JWT-based authentication and authorization
• Understanding of fundamental design principles behind scalable and distributed systems
• Strong debugging, root cause analysis, problem-solving, analytical, and strategic thinking abilities, capable of making well-informed and timely decisions
• Hands-on experience with AKS (pod logs, deployment health, kubectl) and observability tooling, specifically Grafana and Azure Monitor/Application Insights
• Familiarity with SRE principles including incident management, alerting best practices, and production observability

Nice to Have

• Experience with DevOps tooling (Docker, Kubernetes, Azure Pipelines, Azure Container Registry)
• Familiarity with event streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka
• Experience with graph databases (Neo4j)
• Experience with distributed application runtimes such as Dapr or Restate
• Experience with HTTP frameworks such as Axum including WebSocket support
• Familiarity with one other backend language, such as C#/.NET, Golang, or Python
• Familiarity with Backup and Disaster Recovery concepts.

Why NextLink Labs

• We’re a technical consulting firm that values clarity, ownership, and outcomes
• Remote-first culture, flexible work schedule, and autonomy to do your best work.
• Responsibility and autonomy at a growing company
• The opportunity to build something big and exciting

Visa Sponsorship

• At this time, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship or take over sponsorship for existing visas. Candidates must be authorized to work in Canada without the need for current or future sponsorship.