Congratulations to the First Round of Rust Project Maintainers in Residence
We are pleased to join in the celebration of the inaugural cohort of the Rust Maintainers in Residence (MiR) program, made possible through the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund (RFMF). Cheers to MiRs Gen Li, Alejandra González, Chris Denton, León Orell Valerian Liehr, and Maintainer Grantees Jonas Böttiger and Jason Newcomb. We are celebrating more than funding these individuals. We are celebrating an investment in something every successful open source project depends on: maintenance.
Per RFC #3931, the Maintainer in Residence program is dedicated to hiring long-term maintainers and funding their maintenance work in full. A Maintainer in Residence’s time is split between priorities guided by the teams they are supporting and priorities of their own choosing within the project. The RFMF raised a total of $350,000 in its first round of funding thanks to generous donations from Google, AWS, OpenAI, and the Rust Project Leadership Council.
A Word To Our Sponsors
Before I dive into the behind the scenes process of selecting MiRs and Maintainer Grant recipients I would like to take a moment on behalf of the Funding Team to personally thank the advocates within each company, Tyler Mandry (@tmandry) of Google, Niko Matsakis (@nikomatsakis) and Jess Izen (@jlizen) of AWS, Predrag Gruevski (@obi1kenobi) and the Codex Team at OpenAI, and the Rust Project Leadership Council, Jakub Beránek (@kobzol), Oli Scherer (@oli-obk), Mara Bos (@m-ou-se), Josh Triplett (@joshtriplett), Travis Cross (@traviscross), Rémy Rakic (@lqd), Manish Goregaokar (@manishearth), and former member Eric Huss (@ehuss). Each of these individuals went to bat for the maintainers of the Rust Project and helped us raise our first round of $350,000. We literally would not have a fund without your advocacy and support of the maintainers you work alongside.
A Word From A Few of Our Sponsors
AWS:
“AWS is proud to sponsor the first cohort of Rust Maintainers in Residence. Rust is increasingly the foundation of the world’s software infrastructure, including at Amazon, and we’re excited to see both the toolchain and the community continue to grow. The Maintainers Fund and Maintainers in Residence program give the Rust community a way to invest directly in the people who sustain the project, especially with growing usage and an expanding feature set. AWS is grateful to the Rust Project and Rust Foundation for building this program, and we look forward to supporting Rust Project maintainers for years to come.”
– Jim Haughwout, Vice President of Software Builder Experience, Amazon.
OpenAI:
“Investing in maintenance is investing in the long-term success of Rust. We’re thrilled to support the MiR program and fund the maintainers that help improve the tools we use every day.”
– Predrag Gruevski, Member of Technical Staff, OpenAI.
Additionally, Jakub Beránek, Rust Project Leadership Council representative, said:
“The Project Priorities budget of the Leadership Council is designed to support members of the Rust Project. And we don’t know of many better ways of doing that than directly funding our maintainers so that they can focus on improving the Rust toolchain. We are very excited about our contributors receiving the funding that they need!”
How it Works
The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund was established to help fund maintainers in the Rust project. The RFMF is uniquely positioned within the open source funding landscape, as the distribution of MiR positions and Maintainer Grants is at the discretion of the Rust Project Funding Team. That distinction is intentional. The goal is for the funding decisions to be made by a small group of members of the project that are working to get not only a holistic view of the Rust Project, but an understanding of its teams, its maintenance needs, and the work that can have the greatest impact.
I serve on the funding team with Niko Matsakis, Jakub Beránek, and Pete LeVasseur. We all represent different areas of the Rust Project via the teams we are on, and we also represent the Rust Foundation: I’m a Foundation staff member while Niko is a Project Director that sits on our Board. We are documenting our process on the Inside Rust blog (What is maintenance, anyway? and Funding team progress update — July 2026) and in Rust’s Zulip instance.
Our process has two components: maintainers and project needs. Rust maintainers first fill out an intake form indicating what they would like to work on (maintenance, project goals, PR backlogs etc.), how much time they can dedicate to the project, and what type of funding they prefer (full time MiR, part time MiR, or grant Recipient). In parallel, we review the responses, chat with Rust Team Leads, verify the maintainer is in good standing per the Rust Moderation team, and consult a team of Funding Advisors. All of this allows us to get a clearer idea of the health of the Project and areas that are most critical to fund from a variety of viewpoints. It has taken us months to get here but we are very excited to introduce our first MiRs.
Meet the First Maintainers in Residence
Please join us in congratulating the Rust MiRs! Below is a brief summary of some of the things they will be working on over the course of the next 12 months:
Gen Li (@rami3l): Rustup — Full Time MiR
Gen Li’s focus will be on Rustup. He’ll tackle complex issues, mentor contributors, work on important Rustup features and much more.
Alejandra González (@blyxyas): Clippy — Half-Time MiR
Alejandra’s focus will be on performance, making Clippy faster, reviewing PRs, and mentoring folks from the Rust for Linux project to work on Clippy.
Chris Denton (@ChrisDenton): Windows-specific work — Half-Time MiR
Chris has unique expertise in Windows and will put this to use performing refactorings and code reviews, and in implementing new features across the standard library, the compiler and Rustup.
León Liehr (@fmease): rustdoc Team — Half-Time MiR
León’s focus is on general maintenance, joining the rustdoc/compiler code review rotation, and work on refactoring and mentoring.
Jonas Böttiger (@joboet): Library Team — Grant Recipient
Jonas will focus on aiding the library team
Jason Newcomb (@Jarcho): Clippy — Grant Recipient
Jason will focus on aiding the Clippy team
The recipients of Rust MiR and Maintainer Grant funding are helping shine a light on the oftentimes “behind the scenes” work and dedication it takes to sustain a successful open source project. Rust Project members and contributors invest their time, energy, patience, and passion to solve complex problems to keep the language evolving as adoption continues to grow.
Over the next year, our job is to share what those funding dollars accomplished. Supporting the RFMF is one way the community can help ensure the long-term health of the Rust ecosystem, enabling maintainers to focus on foundational work that benefits everyone building with Rust.
More information about each Maintainer in Residence and their planned work is available in the Rust Project’s accompanying announcement: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/08/26/announcing-our-first-maintainers-in-residence/
The Next Maintainer Could Be Funded by All of Us
This first $350,000 is an amazing start but it is not the finish line. We want the Maintainers in Residence program to grow and to do that we need to continue growing the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund.
The Rust Foundation will continue working with companies that depend on Rust to secure significant investments in the people who maintain it. But sustainable open source shouldn’t depend exclusively on a small number of large corporate contributions. This is a community effort.
In that spirit, we’re asking individuals and smaller organizations that use Rust, appreciate Rust, or simply believe that open source maintainers deserve to be supported for their work to consider contributing to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund through GitHub Sponsors.
Our collective community goal is to fund one Full Time MiR at $120,000.
Individual contributions from the community can add up to more hours for maintainers, more grants, and ultimately more people with dedicated time to work on the infrastructure the Rust community relies on. This is an opportunity for the people who benefit from Rust to invest directly in the people who sustain it.
If Rust is important to your work, your company, your projects, or simply to you, please consider becoming a recurring sponsor of the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund.
Every contribution helps us build toward the next Maintainer in Residence, and every additional maintainer we can fund means more dedicated time going directly toward keeping Rust healthy, reliable, and sustainable for everyone.
