Senior Engineer - Rust Backend

Earthmover Senior Engineer - Rust Backend Remote · Full time

We’re hiring a Rust-focused backend engineer to develop our array database, services, and distributed systems. This is a fully-remote position and international applicants are welcome to apply!

About Earthmover

Earthmover is an early-stage startup building a platform for scientific data analytics in the cloud. Our mission is to empower our customers to use scientific data to address our planet’s most urgent challenges.

Description

Earthmover builds cloud data infrastructure for the heaviest scientific workloads of our time: climate and weather, Earth observation, genomics, ML, and large-scale AI research. Our platform supports multidimensional array data at scale, with correctness, performance, and scientific reproducibility at its core.

The platform consists of three major components:

1. Arraylake: a cloud-native data lake for multidimensional scientific array data, offering versioning, cataloging, access control, and collaboration;
2. Flux: a standards-compliant API gateway that serves multidimensional datasets to clients and applications;
3. Icechunk: our open-source Rust-based array database that underpins the entire system.

We are long-time contributors to the scientific data ecosystem through projects such as Zarr, Xarray, Icechunk, and xpublish-tiles. As we expand Arraylake and Flux and introduce new capabilities, we’re focused on problems that matter deeply to scientific users:

• Fast, transparent array access along any dimension
• Search, discoverability, and cross-organization collaboration
• Performance, stability, and scalability across cloud and on-prem environments
• Public datasets that can meaningfully accelerate global scientific work
• Intuitive navigation and visualization of complex hierarchical scientific structures
• Highly available, multi-region APIs for data delivery

Job Description

As a scientific data platform company, we have two primary goals: deliver a world-class array storage and processing system, and build an exceptional collaborative experience on top of it. We’ve established a strong foundation; the next phase is shipping features and products that directly unblock scientific and analytical work at scale.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and expand Icechunk , our open-source Rust array database.
• Design, build, and operate Rust-based pipelines, services, and execution engines within the Arraylake platform.
• Improve our API performance, reliability, and overall quality—including observability, stability, versioning, and integration patterns.

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience.
• 1+ years of professional Rust experience (async Rust is a strong plus).
• Write Python comfortably, or can become proficient quickly.
• Experience building and testing distributed systems .
• Product-minded and enjoy working directly with both scientists and customers to shape features around real workflows.
• Enjoy partnering with other parts of the stack (e.g., frontend) to rapidly iterate on new product capabilities.
• Are excited about the mission (above), even if you haven’t worked with every technology or responsibility listed. We have a strong team and can help the right candidate grow into parts of the role.

Our Stack

• Cloud: Primarily AWS; also supporting Google Cloud and on-prem deployments
• Languages: Python and Rust for services and array storage; Python for client libraries
• Infra: Pulumi (Typescript) for IaC
• Frontend: Next.js deployed on Vercel

Salary

$100,000 - $200,000 per year