Rust Backend Engineer

Cruitical is hiring on behalf of a Series A cloud observability company. They build an open-source platform for logs, metrics and traces, engineered to run at a fraction of the storage and cost of the incumbents. The stack is Rust throughout, on Apache Arrow, DataFusion and Tokio, and the performance work is the product rather than a background chore. The team is fully remote, with engineering based in India.

The Role:

You write the Rust that makes observability data cheap to store and fast to query. That's ingestion paths, columnar storage, query execution, and the distributed systems work that keeps all of it correct when volume spikes.

This is backend engineering where the constraint is real. Observability platforms live or die on cost per gigabyte and query latency at scale, so the difference between a good implementation and an adequate one shows up directly in what customers pay.

Month 1: You've shipped into the ingestion or query path and you understand where the current bottlenecks actually are rather than where they're assumed to be.

Month 3: Something you built measurably improved throughput, storage efficiency or query latency, and you can explain the trade-off you made to get there.

Who thrives here:

• You write Rust for real systems, not for side projects. Ownership, lifetimes and async are working tools rather than things you fight. If you've shipped production Rust under load, that's the signal.
• You've worked on data-intensive backends. Databases, streaming pipelines, storage engines, query engines. Anything where the shape of the data on disk determined whether the thing was fast.
• You're comfortable being remote and self-directed. The team is distributed across India and the US. Written communication and independent judgement carry more weight here than they would in an office.

Some nice-to-haves:

• Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Parquet, or other columnar formats
• Observability tooling, whether building it or operating it seriously
• Open-source contributions, since the product itself is open source
• Distributed systems fundamentals, from consensus to partitioning

Why this role?

Observability is a market where the incumbents charge enough that customers actively resent them, which is an unusually good place to be building an open-source alternative. The company has Series A backing and a product already deployed in production.

The engineering here is genuinely hard and genuinely measurable. Fully remote, with a small enough team that the systems decisions you make stay yours.

About the hiring process

This role is being filled through Cruitical's assessment platform. Everyone who applies gets an actual shot at the role and guaranteed actionable feedback.

Instead of six rounds of interviews, you'll complete a structured work simulation that mirrors the actual job. You'll work with real tools, solve an ambiguous problem, and demonstrate how you think. The company gets signal on what you can actually do. You get signal on whether this is work you'd enjoy.

You do this once, and we match you to fitting jobs at accelerated stages. Fair, and fast, for everyone involved.

Apply here or reach out to learn more about the company.