Remote Senior Rust Developer at Toptal

Description

We are looking for a Senior Rust Developer. Their goal is to advance computational biology by developing scalable, open-source workflow execution engines that empower scientists to efficiently deploy and manage large-scale computations.

General Information

Location: Remote. Open to talents from GMT-8 to GMT+5 time zones. The client is not open to China, Australia or countries in similar time zones.
Overlap: 3 - 4 hours with Chicago/Texas (US Central Time)
Length: 6 months (with potential for extension)

Project Information

Sprocket is an open workflow execution engine written in Rust—it enables scientists, who are generally not experts at scaling and deploying large-scale computation, to write simple workflow descriptions using the Workflow Description Language.

Requirements

Required Skills:

Senior-level proficiency in Rust, with a strong track record of shipping production code
Experience contributing to or leading open-source projects
Familiarity with workflow engines, scientific computing, or large-scale computation
Ability to work with Rust crates for lexing, parsing, validating, linting, formatting, testing, and executing domain-specific languages
Strong skills in API design and specification development
Experience using GitHub for project planning and collaboration

Optional Skills (not mandatory):

Experience developing or improving specifications using OpenAPI (Swagger)
Familiarity with the Workflow Description Language (WDL) and Task Execution Schema (TES)
Experience with Kubernetes or cloud/HPC environments
Prior involvement with standards bodies (e.g., GA4GH)
Experience with Rust crates such as utoipa for OpenAPI/Swagger documentation

Deliverables

Contribute to the development and enhancement of the Sprocket workflow execution engine and related Rust crates (e.g., wdl, sprocket, crankshaft)
Improve and extend the Workflow Description Language (WDL) specification, including proposing, drafting, and shepherding changes through the ratification process
Collaborate on the evolution of the Task Execution Schema (TES), including interaction with standards bodies and the open-source community
Develop and maintain reference implementations, ensuring comprehensive API documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger)
Regularly communicate progress and coordinate with the internal computational biology team

Benefits

Full-time and long-term role
Opportunity to work on impactful, open-source technology used by scientists worldwide
Influence the direction of open standards in scientific workflow execution