Leadership change in the Rust Infrastructure Team

Sept. 8, 2023 · Pietro Albini on behalf of the infrastructure team

After almost four years leading the Rust Infrastructure Team, in late July I expressed my intent to step down as lead of the team to focus back on technical work. On one side, I need to rest and recharge after doing organizational and governance work for so long. On the other side, it's healthy for the team to rotate its leadership role to bring fresh ideas to the table!

Like the other Rust teams, the lead in the infra team is not who makes the final decision, and their vote doesn't have more weight. We make all decisions together, and the lead is mostly responsible for running meetings, making sure important tasks are not dropped on the floor, and representing the team with third parties.

The whole team met this week to discuss our future. We decided that we want to take inspiration from the compiler team's rolling leads: we will have two leads at the same time, with the expectation that after a number of years (still to be defined) the one who served the most time as lead will step down, making space for a new lead. We will also document our process in the coming months.

We also have consensus on the two new leads of the team! I'm happy to announce that for the next few years, the new team leads for infra will be:

  • Jake Goulding (@shepmaster), long time member of the infra team. He maintains the Rust Playground, and has been instrumental in the support for Apple Silicon in our CI.

  • Jan David Nose (@jdno), who joined the Rust Foundation last year to work full-time inside the infrastructure team, bringing a lot of experience and time.

On behalf of the team I want to thank them for stepping up, and we all wish them best of luck in their new role!

As for myself, I'm proud of the work the whole team has been doing over the past four years and all the challenges we overcame. It's been an honor serving as the lead and I look forward to going back to technical work in the coming months.

Pietro.