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.

As Operations Manager 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.

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.

As Director of Finance & Funding, Paul Lenz is responsible for the financial management of the Foundation, as well as the development and management of the Rust Foundation Community Grants Program. Paul brings a background in senior roles spanning telecoms, open source, and non-profit. Prior to joining the Rust Foundation, he worked at Indigo Trust, a philanthropic body supporting digital, legal, and development projects in the UK, Europe and Africa.

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.

Jon Bauman has worked in tech for two decades across various industries and programming disciplines. He is a proud alumnus of the University of Michigan, Etsy, and Mozilla. Jon brought his experience in Rust and standards development to bear as the implementer of AVIF support in Firefox and the Mozilla representative to the Alliance for Open Media.

As a member of the Rust Foundation’s growing engineering team, Jon applies the same skills to deeply understand complex systems and the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, forge pragmatic solutions, and build systems for the long term for the Rust/C++ Interop Initiative.

Jan David (“JD”) Nose leads the Rust Foundation’s efforts around supporting the infrastructure of the Rust language. JD is also the Rust Project’s Infrastructure Team co-Lead. In this position, JD is responsible for the operations of all currently supported and future infrastructure, including managing both existing tools and new development.

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.

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.

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 release-plz and hosts the RustShip podcast.

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.

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.