About
THE RUST FOUNDATION is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to stewarding the Rust programming language, supporting Rust communities worldwide, and investing in the Rust talent pool.
OUR MISSION is for global computer systems to be more secure, sustainable, scalable, and efficient through the use of the Rust programming language.
To learn more about how this mission has recently translated into tangible impact for the Rust ecosystem, read our 2025 Annual report. For insight into how it is shaping the work we prioritize today, visit our 2026-2028 Strategy Plan:
Board of Directors
The Rust Foundation’s Board of Directors is composed of representatives from our member organizations (“Member Directors”) and the Rust Project (“Project Directors”) who share equal voting power and act collectively to govern the Foundation in accordance with our Bylaws and their Terms of Reference.
Member Directors
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Nell Shamrell-Harrington
Chair, Member Director, Microsoft
Learn more about Nell Shamrell-Harringtonshe/theyNell serves as both the Chair of our board and the Member Director for Platinum Member, Microsoft. Outside of the Rust Foundation, Nell works at Microsoft as a Principal Software Engineer.
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Jeff represents Google on the Rust Foundation’s Board of Directors. As a software engineer on the Android security team, he led the integration of Rust into the Android platform to prevent vulnerabilities at scale.
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Andrew Wafaa serves on our Board of Directors, representing ARM. Andrew is the Distinguished Engineer, Senior Director Software Communities at Arm, where he leads the company’s Open Source Office and its relationships with the broader open-source community. With over 20 years in open source, he also holds leadership positions in various foundations, including the Yocto Project (where he is Chair) and the FreeBSD Foundation, and serves on the boards for the Xen Project and the Rust Foundation.
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Rohan Patil serves on the Board of Directors for Rust Foundation, representing Meta. Rohan leads the Languages Foundation organization for programming languages and runtimes at Meta, including Rust, Go, Java, JavaScript and the Hermes JavaScript engine.
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Seth serves as the Member Director for Platinum Member, AWS. In addition to his work with the Rust Foundation, Seth works at AWS as the Senior Principal Software Engineer of S3.
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Peixin serves as the Member Director for Platinum Member Huawei. Outside of the Rust Foundation, Peixin works at Huawei as the Chief Software Architect and Community Director for Open Source at Huawei Technologies.
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Each Platinum Member of the Rust Foundation holds a dedicated seat on our board. For Gold Members, representation depends on their total number: if there are between four and seven Gold Members, they are collectively represented by one Gold Member Representative. If there are eight or more Gold Members, they are represented by two Gold Member Directors. There is one Representative dedicated to all Silver Members. Click here to learn more about the roles and responsibilities of our Member Directors.
Project Directors
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Carol has been an active contributor to and leader of the Rust Project for many years. She currently serves on the Rust Project crates.io Team and has previously served on the Project’s Leadership Council, the Dev Tools Team, and the former Rust Core Team. Carol is also a co-founder of Integer 32, LLC, the world’s first Rust-focused software consultancy, has organized various Rust community events and conferences in the past, and is the co-author of the Rust Book.
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David has been contributing to the Rust compiler since 2017 and currently co-leads the compiler team. Professionally, he leads Arm’s Rust team, improving support for Arm platforms in the Rust toolchain and ecosystem.
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Jack has been contributing to the Rust Project since 2019, working mainly on the type system. He is currently a Compiler Team Maintainer, serves as co-lead for the Types Team, co-leads the Vision Doc effort, and previously served on the Leadership Council. He finished his PhD in July 2025 in Biomedical Sciences, and currently contributes primarily to the Rust Project thanks to support from Futurewei Technologies.
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Nicholas Matsakis is a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS and co-lead of the open source Rust language design team. He has worked on Rust since 2011 and led the design of its “secret sauce”, the borrow checker. He has played a number of other roles in Rust over the years, such as being a member of the Rust core team, the lead of the Rust compiler team, and helping to launch the Rust Foundation. Prior to working on Rust, he completed a PhD at ETH Zurich and did his undergraduate studies at MIT.
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Ryan Levick began exploring Rust in 2014 and immediately started looking for ways to be involved in the community. Over time he participated more by co-organizing the Berlin Rust meetup, producing YouTube tutorials, helping with various Rust Project efforts, and more. In 2019, Ryan got the opportunity to work with Rust full time leading developer advocacy for Rust at Microsoft and helping build up the case for Rust as an official language inside of Microsoft. Nowadays, he’s an active member of the Rust Project where he is a member of Compiler and Infrastructure Team, helps run the annual State of Rust Survey, and much more.
The Rust Foundation board has five seats reserved for Project Directors. Project Directors serve two year terms and are elected by the Rust Project through a process developed by the Rust Project Leadership Council. Click here to learn more about the roles and responsibilities of our Project Directors.
Our Team
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Dr. Rebecca Rumbul leads the Rust Foundation as Executive Director & CEO. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics and Governance and has worked as a consultant and researcher with governments, parliaments, and development agencies all over the world, advocating for openness and transparency, and developing tools to improve digital participation. In addition to leading the Rust Foundation, Rebecca is a Non-Executive Director and Council Member for the UK Advertising Standards Authority and a Trustee of the Hansard Society.
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As Director of Operations and a founding member of our staff team, Abi is responsible for transforming the internal capacity of the Foundation to meet its growing ambition. Abi has 20 years of experience implementing and formalizing systems and procedures in growing organizations across the digital and non-profit spaces. She has a keen interest in digital transformation and the possibilities offered by new technologies.
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As the Rust Foundation’s Director of Technology, Joel oversees the technology and engineering programs and initiatives of the Rust Foundation. Prior to joining the Rust Foundation as a founding staff member, Joel worked at Facebook/Meta as a Developer Advocate and ecosystem lead with prominent participation in high-impact standards organizations including Open Web Docs and Ecma.
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Lori has a passion and enthusiasm for working with developers and the open source community. She is an active member of multiple open source foundations, such as CNCF, CDF, OpenSSF, DoK, and has volunteered as a program committee member for Kubecon, Cloud Native Rejekts, cdCon, SOOCon, and FOSDEM. She has also given talks at conferences around the world, including KubeCon EU, All Things Open, FOSDEM, Devoxx Morocco, SOOCon, Open Source Summit, KCDC, The Linux Foundation Member Summit, SOSS Fusion, and CodeMash.
Lori is committed to helping open source and other tech communities grow and adapt in the ever-changing technical landscape.
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Gracie oversees the Rust Foundation’s public relations and marketing strategies and manages all outbound communications. Throughout her career, Gracie has focused on telling compelling stories for technology communities and organizations. Before joining the Rust Foundation team, Gracie held various content strategy and editorial direction positions at the Linux Foundation, Forem/dev.to, and several startups. She has also worked as a freelance communications consultant for open source clients.
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Walter Pearce is a key leader of the Rust Foundation’s Security Initiative. Walter comes from a 14-year career in security. For the past seven years, he has specialized in offensive security in the gaming industry, leading efforts to find and mitigate vulnerabilities affecting tens of millions of players at Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment. Before that, he was a security consultant providing penetration testing, red teaming, and code review services for many Fortune 100 companies whose foci included operating systems, languages, and embedded systems. Walter has always had a passion for technical security problems and has built his career helping craft novel solutions to new, challenging issues in security. In his spare time, Walter enjoys playing open source games. He was previously a contributor and member of the Amethyst Game Engine and a lead contributor on other open source game development projects.
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Tobias Bieniek is the Rust Foundation’s crates.io-focused Software Engineer. He has been involved with the Rust ecosystem since roughly 2015. He started out by working on the intellij-rust project. For the past several years, he has been contributing to the crates.io codebase.
In 2019, Tobias officially joined the crates.io team. In May 2021, they asked him to co-lead the team. In mid-2022, Tobias applied for the first round of fellowship grants from the Rust Foundation, part of our Community Grants Program.
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Adam Harvey is the Rust Foundation’s security-focused Software Engineer. He partners with Walter Pearce to carry out priorities identified by our Security Initiative. Adam is a self-described generalist software developer who has worked at a variety of companies and open source projects including New Relic, Sourcegraph, and PHP in the course of his 20-year career. Originally from Western Australia, he has lived in Vancouver, Canada for the past 10 years.
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Marco started his career as an Embedded System Engineer. Since 2020 he worked as a Rust Backend Engineer, building microservices with high performance requirements. During his spare time, he maintains
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As our Program Manager, Tina leads a range of initiatives across marketing, events, training, and membership. She brings over a decade of experience in event and project management, with a strong focus on conferences and community programs for technical audiences. Having previously worked for the Drupal Association, The Linux Foundation, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Tina has an extensive background in open source and non-profit operations.
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Ernest Kissiedu is the organizer of Rust Nation UK: a conference that focuses on introducing people to the Rust ecosystem. He is also the organizer of the Rust London Meetup Group and a co-founder of the DevX Initiative, which empowers current and would-be Rust contributors through research, workshops, and sponsorship. At the Rust Foundation, Ernest works on a contracted basis to help us better serve global Rust communities and develop events.
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Ubiratan Soares (“Ubi”) started his professional career as a Mobile Engineer, and over the course of almost 15 years, he became a generalist software engineer with a special taste for infrastructure, security, automation and all things around. He partners with Marco Ieni to make the Rust infrastructure a bit better every day. Ubiratan was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and he has been living in Spain since 2019.
Technology and Engineering at the Foundation
The Rust Foundation’s engineering staff are dedicated to supporting the technical needs of the Rust Foundation through software development and administering strategic initiatives in partnership with the Rust Project and wider Rust Ecosystem. Our engineering staff are currently three primary areas of focus:
- A Security Initiative, helping ensure that the Rust ecosystem is as secure as possible, including by releasing valuable tools such as Painter.
- Infrastructure support, driving engineering and efficiency efforts to ensure that the growing number of Rust developers have a great experience while also managing costs.
- An approved Rust specification effort, providing people and resources to help the Project deliver a useful and quality language specification.
Infrastructure and Technology Donors
The following organizations have generously donated in-kind infrastructure and technology services to the Rust Foundation. Our Technology Team team is grateful for the benefits they provide to the Foundation and Rust ecosystem.
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Since 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 102 Availability Zones within 32 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Canada, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. In addition to serving as a founding Platinum Member of the Rust Foundation, AWS has made generous in-kind and financial donations in support of our Security Initiative.
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Datadog’s SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, real-user monitoring, and many other capabilities to provide unified, real-time observability and security for their customers’ entire technology stack. Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, drive collaboration among development, operations, security and business teams, accelerate time to market for applications, reduce time to problem resolution, secure applications and infrastructure, understand user behavior, and track key business metrics.
Through Datadog’s Open Source Program, the Rust Foundation now benefits from a world-class observability platform that strengthens our ability to monitor infrastructure and respond effectively using clear, actionable data for the benefit of Rust.
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Fastly is an American cloud computing services company that provides real-time content delivery network (CDN) services. Their edge cloud platform helps developers extend their cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users.
The Rust Foundation is grateful to be included in Fastly’s Fast Forward program, which allows the Rust Project to harness Fastly’s full-site delivery and powerful Compute@Edge platform at no cost.
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GitHub is the open source platform of choice for the Rust Project. All of the source code, builds and releases for the entire project are available through GitHub. The Rust Foundation helps manage the relationship with GitHub.
GitHub has generously donated the Foundation and the Rust Project in-kind infrastructure for running builds and tests for the Rust language and ecosystem. We appreciate their support of the Foundation and Rust.
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Google is a multinational technology company focusing on artificial intelligence, online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, and consumer electronics. Their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Google joined the Rust Foundation as a founding Platinum Member following years of early exploration of and investment in Rust. They attribute a drop in the share of memory-safety vulnerabilities in Android to their recent Rust adoption.
Google has also lent its time and expertise to the ongoing development of the Security Initiative. We look forward to further collaborating with them as this work continues.
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Microsoft is a software corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services. Their mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft joined the Rust Foundation as a founding Platinum Member following years of early investment in and exploration of Rust. They are collaborating with the Rust community to continue improving the Rust language, providing tooling and library support, creating learning resources, and more.
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Mullvad VPN is a VPN service based in Sweden that focuses on user privacy and security. Mullvad’s features include a no-logs policy, encryption, leak protection, and much more.
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Warp is the Agentic Development Environment and fastest way to build with multiple AI agents — from writing code to shipping it. The Rust Foundation is grateful to Warp for generously donating free memberships to our Technology Team.
Careers
Interested in working with our team? Visit our Careers page to view any current openings and to learn more about life at the Rust Foundation.