Welcoming Jess Izen as Engineer in Residence at the Rust Foundation

The Rust Foundation is pleased to welcome Jess Izen (@jlizen) as our new Engineer in Residence. For the next year, Jess will work full time as part of the Foundation’s engineering team, taking direction from Foundation leadership while remaining an Amazon Web Services (AWS) employee. Jess’s residency will help the Rust Foundation expand support for Rust’s shared infrastructure, community libraries, and maintainers, without drawing on funding that could otherwise support paid positions such as Rust Project Maintainers in Residence.

Jess is a Rust Project member on t-funding-advisors. She helped establish the Rust Commercial Network and maintains Rust crates including axum, tower-http and dial9. On AWS’s Rust language team, her work includes operating Amazon’s internal crates.io mirror and developing open source libraries and tooling. She has also worked with companies and other organizations to raise funding for community libraries, Rust Project goals, and efforts such as the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund and RustNL. Before joining the AWS Rust language team, Jess built anti-DDoS and bot-control services in Rust for AWS WAF.

Building with Rust requires more than the compiler and standard library. Demand on Rust’s shared infrastructure and community libraries increasingly exceeds the resources available to maintain them. Jess’s residency will focus on closing that gap.

She will work with the Foundation’s security engineers and with the relevant Rust Project teams to design and implement improvements to crates.io’s defenses against malicious packages and other supply-chain threats. Together with maintainers and the organizations that depend on their libraries, she will build systems and programs that address problems shared across projects, backing maintainer-led work with Foundation funding and engineering support.

As an example, Jess plans to add support for pre-publication malicious crate checks on crates.io that would flag likely supply chain attacks to move them into a quarantined queue with human review. Expect to see a Project Goal and/or pre-RFC from her about this soon.

Rust Foundation Executive Director & CEO Dr. Rebecca Rumbul says:

“Security work on crates.io and support for widely used Rust libraries are priorities for the Foundation. When Jess approached us about a residency focusing on these areas, we were delighted. Jess brings deep experience across Rust infrastructure, security, and community libraries and has worked closely with Rust Project members and maintainers. She will work with our staff, the relevant Rust Project teams, and maintainers to decide where the residency can have the most impact. We’re grateful to AWS for making it possible.”

About her new role, Jess says:

“I’ve spent the past several years working on Rust’s libraries and infrastructure from inside AWS. I’m excited for the chance to focus full time on improving security and closing support gaps for Rust’s open-source projects.

One of Rust’s strengths is how many different kinds of organizations build with it. I’ve seen that from one corner, and maintainers and users elsewhere will see problems I don’t. I had some wonderful conversations with peers at the 2026 Rust All Hands that revealed many diverse viewpoints. Figuring out what to build together is the part I’m looking forward to most.

Deep thanks to colleagues across the Rust Project, Rust Foundation, broader Rust community, and AWS, for their trust and guidance as I take on this role, especially: Mara Bos (@m-ou-se), Lori Lorusso (@LoriLorusso), Dirkjan Ochtman (@djc), David Tolnay (@dtolnay), Sean McArthur (@seanmonstar), Mark Rousskov (@mark-simulacrum), David Wood (@davidtwco), Predrag Gruevski (@ob1kenobi), Pete LeVasseur (@PLeVasseur), Jakub Beránek (@Kobzol), Weihang Lo (@weihanglo), David Herman (@dherman), Emil Hernvall (@emilhernvall), Dan Gardner (@dangardner), Celina Val (@celinval), Carl Lerche (@carllerche), Russell Cohen (@rcoh), and Niko Matsakis (@nikomatsakis).”

Please join us in welcoming Jess to the Rust Foundation team!