Senior Full Stack Rust Engineer, Fixed Term - Toronto

About this role

WHY DEPT®?

We are pioneers at heart. What this means, is that we are always leaning forward, thinking of what we can create tomorrow that does not exist today. We were born digital and we are a new model of agency, with a deep skillset in tech and marketing. That’s why we hire curious, self-driven, talented people who never stop innovating.

Our culture is big enough to cope and small enough to care. Meaning, that with people across 20+ countries, we’re big enough to provide you with the best tools, global opportunities, and benefits that help you thrive. While acting small by investing in you, your growth, your team, and giving you the autonomy to solve our clients' problems, no matter where you are in the world.

This is a 3 month fixed term salaried contract, located in Ontario Canada. Preferably in Toronto.

The Role:

We are seeking a Full Stack Rust Engineer to join the team as a hands-on contributor building and maintaining production Rust applications. This role spans backend systems engineering, database query development, and frontend contribution — with the center of gravity firmly on backend Rust development in a distributed, containerized environment. This is a build-and-ship role. The successful candidate writes production Rust, debugs production Rust, and owns the quality and performance of the systems they deliver.

What You’ll Do:

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Design, develop, and maintain production Rust applications, including backend services, APIs, and system-level components

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Write and optimize complex SQL queries for performance and correctness at scale

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Debug and troubleshoot Rust applications in production environments, including memory safety issues, concurrency bugs, and performance regressions

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Contribute to frontend development using React where needed, including integration with micro frontend architectures

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Participate in the design and implementation of microservice and distributed system architectures

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Write and maintain comprehensive test suites: unit tests, integration tests, and end-toend tests following established best practices

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Deploy, monitor, and maintain services in containerized Kubernetes environments

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Implement and maintain observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and alerting for missioncritical distributed systems

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Communicate technical decisions and trade-offs clearly to team members at all levels

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Mentor junior engineers on Rust best practices, systems design, and production engineering discipline

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Leverage agentic coding assistive tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude CLI) responsibly to accelerate development while maintaining code quality and security standards

What You Bring:

• 5+ years of experience creating and managing Rust applications in production environments

• Strong command of Rust's ownership model, lifetime system, trait system, and error handling patterns

• Experience with the async Rust ecosystem (Tokio, async-std, or equivalent runtimes)

• Proficiency with common Rust web frameworks and libraries (Actix, Axum, Warp, or equivalent)

• Demonstrated ability to debug Rust applications in production: diagnosing panics, memory issues, deadlocks, and performance bottlenecks

• Strong systems/backend engineering experience in a production setting — this is not a prototyping or research role

• Experience designing and building APIs, background workers, data pipelines, or other backend services that run reliably at scale

• SQL and Data Strong experience creating scalable and efficient SQL queries, including complex joins, window…