We are very happy to announce the Rust Project's first round of Maintainers in Residence:
Gen Li (@rami3l), Chris Denton (@ChrisDenton), Alejandra González (@blyxyas), León Liehr (@fmease), and Maintainer Grant recipients: Jason Newcomb (@Jarcho) and Jonas Böttiger (@joboet). These contributors will be funded for their rust-lang maintenance activities for (at least) the following 12 months!
The funding of the Maintainer in Residence (MiR) and Maintainer Grantee roles is possible thanks to generous donations to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund (RFMF) from Google, AWS, OpenAI, the Rust Project Leadership Council and also individual sponsors. We also want to thank the people who advocated for maintainer funding within their companies; Tyler Mandry from Google, Niko Matsakis and Jess Izen from AWS and Predrag Gruevski from OpenAI, and also the whole Rust Leadership Council and our funding advisors. If you would like to help us support even more Rust contributors, consider donating to RFMF.
The Rust Foundation has published a press release and a blog post, where you can learn more about the sponsors and the supported contributors.
Read more below to learn about the MiR program, how we chose the funded contributors, and of course who they are!
Background
The Maintainer in Residence program, established in RFC 3931, is designed to provide stable financial support for Rust contributors, so that they can truly focus on crucial maintenance activities. Currently, there are three categories of support that we offer:
- Full-time MiR: funded for 5 days/week of Rust Project work
- Half-time MiR: funded for ~2.5 days/week of Rust Project work
- Maintainer Grant: funded for ~1 day/week of Rust Project work
Funding for this program comes from the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, which was launched recently, and the whole program is managed by the Rust Funding team.
When deciding who to fund, we took a systematic approach. First, we looked at Rust teams to understand their maintenance baseline (the smallest number of maintainers they need to ensure a healthy long-term status of the given project or repository), and how far they currently are from that baseline. From there, we identified and prioritized Rust teams who were both critically underfunded, and have a high impact on the language and its users. These teams (in no particular order) were rustdoc, rustup, cargo, compiler, libs, clippy, rustfmt, rust analyzer and mods.
The next step was pairing these teams with maintainers looking for funding. And it turns out that finding such maintainers for some teams turned out to be much more difficult than we originally assumed! For example, some maintainers are already employed, some do not want to be funded, and while we did our best to promote our funding efforts, not everyone looking for funding actually asked us for it. We also realized that some teams on our list have essentially no active members, which makes it tricky to onboard new contributors, even if they would like to help out.
In the end, we decided to start by supporting six contributors, who will help maintain several critical Rust projects and teams and who could start immediately. However, we are not stopping there. Our funding efforts are ongoing, so stay tuned for more MiR announcements in the near future! If you would like to learn more about our process, check out our recent post.
And now, without further ado, let's meet our newly funded maintainers!
Gen Li (@rami3l)
Related posts
Tachyum, developer of heavily-delayed universal Prodigy processor, voluntarily files for bankruptcy
Best Early Black Friday Espresso Machine Deals (2026)
I Read the Clankers' Code
A Right-Wing Think Tank Has a Plan to Prevent Democrats From Being Seated in Congress
White Noise Machines Worthy of Your Nightstand in 2026: Snooz, Hatch, and More
