Rust Software Engineer
Rust Software Engineer
Location: Glasgow, hybrid (50/50 split between home and office)
Salary: Up to £65,000 DOE
KO2's client develops advanced cheminformatics software that helps scientists understand and work better with chemical data. They're looking for an experienced Rust Software Engineer to join their small, growing team in Glasgow. You'll build robust, high-performance Rust components and turn complex scientific algorithms into safe, efficient, well-tested code. You'll also help integrate that work with the company's established C++ codebase.
The company is international and close-knit. The Glasgow team works closely with colleagues in small offices in Germany and France, so you'll be part of a collaborative, multicultural engineering group.
You'll work closely with chemistry subject-matter experts and implement their algorithms using idiomatic Rust and sound design principles. You'll be one of the main code reviewers, protect the quality and consistency of the architecture, and mentor junior developers as they continue to grow.
Key responsibilities
- Design, build and maintain high-performance Rust libraries and services for cheminformatics applications
- Implement new cheminformatics algorithms specified by the SMEs
- Review algorithm specifications for feasibility and clarity before implementation
- Integrate Rust components with the existing C++ codebase through safe, well-designed FFI boundaries
- Act as a primary code reviewer, protecting the team's architectural consistency and code quality
- Own the test strategy for your work, covering unit and integration tests, property-based tests, edge cases and regression protection
- Maintain Cargo workspaces, build tooling and related Linux infrastructure
- Mentor junior developers on idiomatic Rust, ownership and borrowing, clean code and architecture
- Work with colleagues in Glasgow, Germany and France
- Document your implementations clearly, including public API docs with rustdoc
Essential skills and experience
- Significant commercial Rust experience, ideally in performance-sensitive or systems-level work
- A deep understanding of Rust's ownership model, lifetimes and type system, and how to design clean APIs around them
- An architectural mindset. You use traits, generics and modular crate design to build maintainable, extensible systems
- Strong code review skills. You give thorough, constructive feedback and can spot subtle logic errors, unnecessary unsafe and design drift
- A solid understanding of concurrency in Rust, including Send and Sync, synchronisation primitives, and data-parallel libraries such as Rayon
- Experience writing and reviewing unsafe code responsibly, with clear safety invariants
- Familiarity with the Rust toolchain and quality tools: Cargo, Clippy, rustfmt, Miri and sanitisers
- Experience developing on Linux
Desirable skills
- Commercial C++ experience, and confidence working across a mixed Rust/C++ codebase
- Rust-C++ interoperability using tools such as cxx or bindgen
- Python bindings with PyO3 and maturin, plus Python testing with pytest
- Experience of AI-assisted development, such as using Claude Code and directing coding agents on architectural decisions
- Implementing algorithms from specifications, and reasoning about their efficiency and complexity
- Async Rust (e.g. Tokio) and network programming
- Benchmarking and profiling with tools such as Criterion and perf
- Docker and containerised build environments
- Maintaining CI/CD pipelines
What's on offer
- A competitive salary, depending on experience
- Flexible hybrid working, split 50/50 between home and the Glasgow office
- A small, growing Glasgow team that you can help shape
- Working with international colleagues in Germany and France
- Challenging, meaningful work on scientific software
- A senior role with real influence over architecture and code quality
How to apply
Send your up-to-date CV to KO2 Embedded Recruitment Solutions, or contact Laurence Powell today for more details.