Rust Engineer - Remote

NAVA Software is looking for a Rust Engineer Details: Sr.

Rust Engineer Duration: 6 Months(Contract to Hire) Location: Remote (PST time zone) What you'll do: 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 behavior 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).

What you bring: 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, Prometheus/Grafana/Tempo). A background in film, video, or post-production, or other professional media workflows.