For memory safety that holds without a runtime to fall back on
Hire Rust Developers
Rust's guarantees only hold if unsafe code is used deliberately and rarely, not as a convenient escape hatch every time the borrow checker gets in the way. These engineers are tested on exactly that discipline, then placed to keep your codebase's safety guarantees genuinely intact.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a Rust engineer
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every engineer we send.
The Rust bar is published, not assumed: five competencies, the exact task behind each, and the shortcut that ends a candidacy. Most interviews ask about syntax. This one asks whether the memory safety is actually real.
What we listen forWhether they solve the design problem, not bypass the compiler's warning.
A contributor is fighting the borrow checker on a design and wants to reach for unsafe to bypass it. Walk us through your response.
- What strong sounds like
- Investigates whether a different ownership structure resolves the conflict before considering unsafe as a last resort.
- What gives us pause
- Approves the unsafe block to unblock the contributor without exploring whether the ownership design itself could be fixed instead.
Rust · Cargo · Tokio
Unsafe Rust · FFI · WebAssembly
cargo test · Miri · Criterion
Clippy · rustfmt · Docker
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$2,900–3,700per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$4,000–5,000per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$5,300–6,600per month
Rust engineer
3 yrs · US East overlap
Redesigned an ownership structure that removed an unexplained unsafe block entirely
- Rust
- Cargo
- Clippy
Senior Rust engineer
7 yrs · UK + EU hours
Found that a 'zero-cost' abstraction was silently cloning data and fixed it without an API change
- Tokio
- Unsafe Rust
- Criterion
Lead Rust engineer
9 yrs · EU + US split
Owns the unsafe-code review standard applied across a performance-critical library
- Architecture
- FFI
- Miri
- WebAssembly
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
This process tests ownership judgement, not familiarity with Rust's syntax. Stopping at any point along the way costs you nothing.
Define the safety problem
We map where your codebase's ownership design or unsafe-code discipline is actually under strain. The brief names that gap, not a list of Rust features to know.
A brief your leads signMatch against your codebase
Candidates are screened against your actual concurrency model, your unsafe-code surface and your review culture. Three engineers who understand your codebase beat thirty who list Rust on a CV.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
Your team can watch the unsafe-code review and lifetime-design exercises directly. What shows up is ownership judgement, not familiarity with the borrow checker's error messages.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your process
Access, standards and a first bounded change to real production code. Continuity cover keeps a departure from ever becoming your emergency.
A merged change in week one
04Evidence and proof
Engineers who kept memory safety genuinely intact.
Rust proof is a safety guarantee verified as real, not just claimed. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
An unsafe block that turned out not to be necessary at all.
Vela Ledger's transaction-processing library carried an unsafe block nobody could explain, added under a past deadline. An embedded Rust engineer redesigned the ownership structure and removed the unsafe code entirely without any performance cost.
- Unsafe blocks removed
- One, with no performance cost
- Time to redesign
- One sprint
He found that our 'zero-cost' abstraction was actually cloning data on every call, and fixed it without changing the API.
Sample · pending client approval
The lifetime redesign she proposed made a struct nobody wanted to touch approachable again.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an engineer, a systems pod, or a practice.
Most teams start with one engineer working inside an existing codebase. Some need a pod that owns a performance-critical component end to end. Where a whole system needs building from scratch rather than one role filled, we point you to the practice instead.
- Team extension
One named engineer
A single Rust specialist inside your direction and your reviews. The smallest commitment, and the usual first step.
- Delivery pods
A systems pod
A pod with its own lead that owns a performance-critical component end to end, unsafe code included. You set priorities while the pod carries delivery.
- Software architecture
The practice, not the person
Where a whole system needs building from scratch rather than one role filled, software architecture takes that scope on instead.
06Straight answers
Asked before a Rust hire is signed.
01What does a Rust engineer actually do day to day?
Designs ownership structures that avoid unnecessary complexity, justifies and scopes unsafe code narrowly, and verifies that performance-critical abstractions are genuinely as cheap as claimed. The unglamorous majority of the work is discipline the compiler alone cannot fully enforce.
02Do you hire for embedded, backend or WebAssembly Rust specifically?
Matched to where your code actually runs. Ownership and unsafe-code judgement transfers across all three, then the evaluation confirms familiarity with your specific target.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes, the published tasks are built to be reused directly. Several clients now run the unsafe-code review exercise themselves in later hiring rounds.
04How fast can a Rust engineer start?
A shortlist arrives within days from a bench evaluated continuously. The remaining variable is how quickly your side can open up repository access.
05Who manages the engineer day to day?
Your leads run the reviews and set priorities. What we carry instead is the layer behind the person: continuity, payroll, replacement risk and the handoff work if plans change.
06What if the engineer is not the right fit?
Flag it in the first weeks and we absorb the cost of replacing them. The next engineer is told exactly what missed, keeping second attempts rare.
07Do your Rust developers use AI coding tools?
Yes, openly. AI drafts boilerplate and test scaffolding quickly; the engineer stays accountable for every ownership decision, unsafe-code justification and merge that reaches your codebase.
08How does pricing work for a hired Rust engineer?
The bands above set realistic expectations; the shortlist pins down the exact per-engineer number. No fee up front, monthly billing, and notice-period exit terms.