Contract Systems Engineer (Rust)

Location: UK/Remote Europe (GMT)

Department: Engineering

Contract role

Everything we do is to empower our clients to move forward. Our purpose is to help our clients develop the capabilities they need to outperform their competitors. Our success is a consequence of ensuring our clients are successful. Our company is built on extraordinary people; we aim to attract, inspire, develop and retain them. YLD is a software engineering and design consultancy; we create digital capabilities for our clients that last beyond our engagement. We have offices in London, Lisbon, Porto.

As a Distributed Systems Engineer, you’ll be part of a client team designing and building the core foundations of a highly performant, low-latency system. We’re looking for someone who is curious, deeply technical, and comfortable operating close to the metal. You should have strong systems-level thinking, a solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, and an interest in database internals.

In this role, you’ll help design and implement core infrastructure components, build and optimise binary protocols, and work on performance-critical parts of the system. You’ll collaborate closely with the team through ****context engineering workflows (Claude Code, Codex, Agentic Coding), and you’ll bring a pragmatic, quality-driven approach to problem-solving. You’ll be an effective communicator, a strong collaborator, and someone who thrives in fast-moving engineering environments.

• Strong experience with low-level languages (C/C++/Rust preferred)
• Experience with low-level OS interfaces (file I/O, synchronisation, memory mapping)
• Ability to reason about memory: stack vs heap, allocation costs, fragmentation, paging behaviour
• Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (consistency, replication, durability, fault tolerance)
• Experience with binary formats and on-disk data layout
• Strong interest in database internals (storage engines, indexing, logging, MVCC, etc.)
• Comfortable with TDD and high-quality engineering practices
• Experienced with agentic coding and context engineering; treats AI tooling as a professional workflow, not a novelty
• Strong problem-solving ability and deep system-level reasoning

• The chance to work with a forward-thinking, ethical, and fun group of people and to develop and grow your skills in a fast-moving business.

• 1st Interview with someone from the Talent team (30/45 mins)
• Technical Interview with our Senior Developers (1h30)
• Meet and discuss with a Client Partner (15/30mins)

• Growing every day
• Including everyone
• Relationships built on honesty and ethics
• Inspiring solutions
• Winning together

We’re an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity of all kinds. We don’t discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, age, marital status, or disability status. We also believe in work-life balance and offer flexible working around our core hours.