Update on Rust Foundation Staffing

We are going through some structural changes inside the Rust Foundation. As we grow as an organisation and take on more diverse and critical workstreams, we need to ensure we are delivering the best possible services – security, infrastructure, crates.io, Rust Project support, and more, in the most efficient and impactful way. That sometimes means we need to restructure specific roles or how we do things as an organisation. 

We will soon open recruitment for a new Director of Technical Services to oversee our internal engineering team, and to proactively develop our wider strategic investments in the Rust ecosystem. In the interim, David Wood, Project Director and co-lead of Rust’s Compiler Team, and Principal Engineer at Arm, is stepping in to support the Foundation’s technical activities. Speaking about this, David said:

It’s a privilege to be able to step in to support the Rust Foundation’s excellent engineering team as Interim Director of Technology. I’ve been fortunate to work closely with the Rust Foundation and see first-hand the importance of the work that the team do to maintain and improve the Rust Project’s infrastructure; develop and operate crates.io; and proactively secure and defend the entire crates ecosystem. I look forward to supporting the team in their work and ensuring their valuable efforts are widely recognised, and would like to thank Arm for enabling me to support the Rust Foundation in this capacity.

We have also merged our Outreach and our Communications and Marketing teams into one External Relations team, responsible for events, marketing, communications, outreach and content. This is to make sure we are speaking with one, coherent voice, and that we have a unified strategy across all of our external engagements. This new team is led by Director of External Relations, Lori Lorusso. On taking up this new challenge, Lori said:

I am excited for this opportunity to build a team that’s core function is connecting the dots on the good works happening at the Foundation and Project to the broader technical community. There has never been a more important time than now to amplify the engineering and development magic occurring within the Project and ecosystem to further adoption of Rust. Our goal is to share those stories in a meaningful way that resonates with the technical breadth and depth of our community while remaining approachable and relatable to those just dipping their toes into Rust waters.

We are confident that these are the right changes at the right time, and we look forward to providing further updates as these changes take effect.