Senior Rust Engineer — Colombia

About NextLink Labs

NextLink Labs is a fast growing technology firm focused on helping companies build, scale, and secure their software applications and organizations. We believe that in order for companies, teams, and products to succeed, technology must be utilized effectively and securely. We pride ourselves in helping our clients win in their respective industries.

As a remote-first company with team members spread out all across the country, NextLink Labs continuously works to ensure our work environment is comfortable and collaborative. We also aim to maintain an inclusive work environment where everyone can thrive professionally and live full lives outside of work.

Position Summary

NextLink Labs is seeking a motivated Senior Rust Developer with a strong background in systems programming and distributed services to join our Custom Software Development consulting team. A successful person in this role will be tasked with building and maintaining scalable backend services and APIs for our clients and will be able to seamlessly integrate with our client’s engineering teams.

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.

Your 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

Required Qualifications

• 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 the Colombia without the need for current or future sponsorship.