Senior Rust Systems Engineer

Parry Labs, LLC•Alexandria, VA

About The Position

The Platform is a ~140,000-line Rust workspace spanning 24 crates: no_std embedded primitives, an async Tokio daemon, a 30,000-line distributed consensus engine, post-quantum cryptographic infrastructure, and a real-time WebSocket dashboard. It targets defense and critical infrastructure deployments where deterministic execution and zero-panic guarantees are non-negotiable. We need a Rust engineer who can own the full workspace from hardware abstraction layers to API servers, hold the architecture sound as the system scales to full multi-site production, and treat the no-panic policy as an inviolable contract.

Requirements

5+ years of professional Rust development in production systems
Deep no_std and embedded Rust experience: heapless, fixed-capacity collections, custom allocators
Strong async/Tokio expertise: task orchestration, graceful shutdown, backpressure, and cancellation safety
Track record building multi-crate workspaces with clean dependency management and feature gating
Experience with network protocol implementation: TCP/UDP framing, wire formats, gossip protocols
Proficiency with the Rust testing ecosystem: cargo-fuzz, proptest, criterion, integration test harnesses
Comfort with CI/CD for Rust projects: cross-compilation, clippy enforcement, MIRI for unsafe validation

Nice To Haves

Experience with distributed systems, fault-tolerant consensus, or distributed fault tolerance research
Prior work in defense, aerospace, or environments requiring deterministic execution guarantees
Experience building hardware abstraction layers for embedded sensors or constrained receivers
Contributions to the Rust ecosystem: open-source crates, RFCs, or conference talks
Familiarity with structured binary cryptographic envelope formats
Understanding of Merkle tree construction and public key commitment schemes

Responsibilities

Own and extend the multi-crate Rust workspace: consensus engine, coordination engine, transport layer, daemon orchestration, data ingestion, hardware abstraction layer, and 18+ supporting crates
Maintain no_std compatibility across core crates for constrained embedded deployment targets
Implement and harden production readiness gates: structured logging, rate limiting, replay protection, metrics collection, and durable state persistence
Design and optimize the async runtime architecture (Tokio): task orchestration, graceful shutdown, backpressure handling, and cancellation safety
Enforce the no-panic runtime policy across the entire workspace; systematically eliminate unwrap and expect from all production code paths
Build and maintain CI pipelines, fuzz harnesses (cargo-fuzz), and property-based tests (proptest)
Manage feature-flag complexity and compilation performance across the workspace
Support multi-site deployments: cross-compilation, air-gapped packaging, and site-specific configuration
Maintain safe API boundaries between cryptographic crates and the rest of the workspace
Own the mesh member lifecycle state machine and guard all transitions against invalid progressions
Other duties as assigned