Toptal: Senior Rust Developer

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.

• 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

• 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