---
title: "Role: Rust program manager"
author: TC
date: 2025-02-13
url: https://hackmd.io/VGauVVEyTN2M7pS6d9YTEA
---

# Role: Rust program manager

## Background

Rust is a programming language that helps people build reliable and efficient software at scale. It's a language that many people love.

The members of the Rust Project work together to build and advance this language and its related tooling and infrastructure. We take a particular pride in shipping tools that are stable and well polished.

We've lately been doing more explicit program management as part of our ongoing work to improve and scale our processes for shipping our language and these high quality tools. We've developed systems and standards for this that have proven to work well within the Rust Project, and we've been seeing substantial value from this work being done in the context of our edition and project goal programs.

We're now looking to hire some sharp and talented individuals to support and advance these systems and this work. That's where you come in.

## About you

We're expecting you'll need to learn about how our systems and processes work, so we're OK if you have limited experience in program management. More is always better, of course. What's most important is that you have great communication skills and are able to work with a wide variety of people effectively.

Having some technical background would help a lot. We're not necessarily expecting you to be a professional software engineer (though if you are one and are interested in moving into program management, this might be an interesting role for you). At the same time, many of our systems require some technical skills to work with them effectively, and understanding the work on the items you'll be tracking will require you to build some technical understanding of what is being done. Being really sharp and excited about learning could fill in for some missing experience here.

If you have experience in contributing to or maintaining open source projects, that'd be helpful in understanding our norms. Obviously having specific experience with the Rust Project itself would be particularly helpful. If not, you'll need to have an open mind and, again, be excited to learn.

## Remote work, travel, etc.

This position is remote. People in the Rust Project collaborate together from all over the world, and wherever you are is OK with the caveat that you're OK with joining a number of calls that are mostly scheduled at the intersection of the times convenient for people on the US West Coast and people in Europe. That is, from around 1400 UTC to 2000 UTC (on summer time; an hour later on normal time).

There's no expectation that you'll travel as part of this role. There are conferences periodically, and if you want to go to collaborate with the people there, we'd likely support that financially, but it's also entirely OK if you don't.

## Objectives

:::info
In the items below, we're going to describe what this role entails in some detail. This is just to give you a good idea about it. So keep in mind, the length of this list says more about the amount of detail we're going into rather than about the amount of work.
:::

You will work individually and as a team to support and increase the effectiveness of the Rust Project as a whole by:

- Learning the systems, tools, and standards used for managing the edition and goal programs.
- Supporting the edition and goal teams, as directed by team leadership, in all ways needed to ensure the success of these teams and the programs they manage.
- Meeting regularly with the leads of the edition and goal teams, and participating in the regular meetings of these teams.
- Working with teams across the project to identify team priorities that should be tracked as edition or goal items.
- Working with those proposing edition or goal items to ensure the proposals include all necessary context, and then ensuring that those proposals are brought before the relevant teams.
- Gathering and summarizing feedback from customers of the project, subject matter experts, and others about in-progress items to support teams in making decisions.
- Educating teams, item owners, and other key stakeholders about edition and goal processes, and helping those stakeholders work together to make each item and the program as a whole a success.
- Helping teams identify owners for edition and goal items.
- Working to ensure that item owners receive the support that they need from across the project.
- Proactively working to understand the expectations of teams with respect to each item, and working with item owners to ensure their work is aligned with those expectations so that the outcome of the work is likely to be accepted by and provide value to the teams.
- Identifying the steps needed for an item to be considered complete and adding those steps to the tracking issue.
- Tracking the progress toward each item being complete according to these steps, recording that progress on the tracking issue, identifying gaps that must be addressed, and communicating those to the item owner and the relevant teams.
- When information a team might need is missing, working actively to solicit that information and make it available.
- Estimating the importance and actionability of outstanding items so as to bring those items that are most actionable and important before teams first.
- Coordinating meetings, ensuring that all necessary context is at hand, taking minutes, and helping to ensure meetings are run effectively.
- Communicating decisions reached by teams so that others in the project can act on them.
- Creating a great experience for our partners in the ecosystem by proactively reaching out when our work in the project will affect them.
- Organizing testing and the triaging of issues found.
- Preparing blog posts and other communication about the status of items and of the current edition and goal programs.
- Coordinating with the Foundation to ensure consistency of messaging regarding these items and programs.
- Working to improve the Edition Guide, the Rust Project Goals document, documentation about the edition and goal teams, and other project documentation.
- Embracing and working within the general processes, tools, and systems used by the Rust Project.

That probably sounds like a long list. Don't be too scared by it. It's all currently done today by a couple of volunteers part-time. We're hopeful, of course, that you'll have the drive to do more with each of these than what we're doing currently.

To be a successful program manager in the Rust Project, you must fully and entirely embrace and embody the concept of "servant leadership." That is, there's no place in this project for trying to tell people what to do or to nag them too much about doing it. Instead, your purpose is to support those doing the work by working to uncover what those people need and what's in their way. Then you work to get them what they need and to remove the obstacles. You do whatever you can to help.

The goal is, when you do follow up with people, that they feel thankful and appreciative that you're checking in with them because when they talk with you, in expectation, you solve problems for them.

## Reporting

Within the project, those in this role are accountable to the edition team and to the project goals team, and most directly, to the leads of those teams. It is these teams that will determine, on an ongoing basis, the systems and processes under and according to which this work will be performed, and the standards to which this work will be held.

Formally, the people in this role will report to the technical director of the Rust Foundation, which is currently Joel Marcey. The technical director will ensure that the work is performed in the way and to the standards set out by the teams.

## Terms and rates

This is a contract role with an expectation that you'll be fully committing your energies to it. We'll discuss the terms of compensation, which will depend on your experience and the alignment of that experience with our needs.

## Contact

Please submit your cover letter and resume (please attach the resume as a PDF) to `[e-mail]`. Please fill the subject line with `Hiring: Rust program manager | $source`. For `$source`, please fill in how you heard about this position. E.g., if you heard about this on HN, the subject line should read:

> Hiring: Rust program manager | HN

Please include in your email your normal hourly or daily rate for long-term contract work and your timezone.

If you're already a regular on Rust's Zulip instance, feel free to reach out to TC with these details and your impressions of this document and the work.

## Where we've advertised this role

- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43253470
- `Zulip/#general`: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/122651-general/topic/Hiring.20for.20program.20management/with/506526252
- `Zulip/#edition`: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/268952-edition/topic/Hiring.20for.20program.20management/near/506526652
- `Zulip/#project-goals`: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/435869-project-goals/topic/Hiring.20for.20program.20management/with/506526785
- `inside-rust`: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2025/03/18/hiring-for-program-management.html
- `r/rust`: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1jeehpn/hiring_for_rust_program_management_inside_rust/

## Keywords

This role may be attractive those interested to work in: "program management" or as "program managers", "product management" or as "product managers", and in "project management" or as "project managers".