LiteLLM - Rust Engineer (Founding Rust Engineer)Role:Salary - Up to $260,000 base
- 0.1-0.3% equity
Benefits - Comprehensive Medical, Dental & Vision
- 401(k) with company match
- Breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee provided daily
- Onsite perks and collaborative engineering environment
Location - Onsite - San Francisco (North Beach)
- 5 days/week in office
- ~60 hour/week culture (weekend work optional but common)
Reporting Into - Ishaan (CTO & Co-Founder)
- Extremely high visibility role working directly with company leadership
The Role - Pure Individual Contributor position
- Own the migration of LiteLLM's core platform from Python to Rust
- Define Rust best practices and help establish the company's long-term Rust engineering culture
- Partner directly with the CTO on architectural decisions
- Optimize latency, throughput and overall gateway performance
- Help shape future Rust hiring as the company expands
Technical Requirements - 3-5+ years of professional software engineering experience
- 1-3+ years of production Rust experience
- Strong systems programming fundamentals
- Experience improving latency, throughput and application performance
- Experience building scalable backend or distributed systems
- Ability to complete technical interviews and coding exercises without AI assistance
Nice-to-Haves - Previous language migration experience (especially Go 12 Rust or Python 12 Rust)
- AI infrastructure experience
- Customer-facing engineering experience
- Strong academic background (CMU, MIT, Georgia Tech, etc.)
- Senior or Staff-level ownership experience
Ideal Backgrounds - Amazon
- Cloudflare
- Uber
- Dropbox
- Stripe
- Scale AI
- Perplexity
- Cognition
Crypto backgrounds are welcomed if candidates have strong systems and performance engineering experience.
Screening PrioritiesThe top priorities are:
- Strong Rust fundamentals
- Performance engineering (latency, throughput, systems optimization)
- Customer obsession
Helpful screening questions:
- What product have you worked on that customers loved?
- What feedback did customers have?
- Have you optimized systems for latency or throughput?
- Have you led or contributed to a language migration?
- Can you comfortably code in Rust without AI assistance?
Interview Process1. LHi Recruiter Screen - Background
- Rust experience
- Performance engineering
- Motivation
2. Intro with CTO - Technical background
- Product ownership
- Culture fit
3. Technical Interview - Rust coding exercise
- Whiteboarding
- System design
- Must complete coding without AI
4. Final Onsite - Meet engineering team
- Leadership discussions
- Final evaluation
Hiring Notes - Mission-critical hire
- Highest engineering priority for the company
- Looking to hire immediately
- Target start by end of July
- 24-48 hour interview turnaround
- Company expects to hire approximately 8 engineers per month
