I am a Rust compiler engineer looking for a new job

For the past 3.75 years I have been fortunate to work on Futurewei’s Rust team, where I had enormous freedom to “make Rust better” however I see fit. It has been the highlight of my career and I am grateful to Sid Askary and other Futurewei folks that helped make it happen.

Unfortunately, this job is going away soon; the team is being shrunk due to budget cuts. I don’t have insight into the detailed reasoning, but I suspect it mostly comes down to two things: (a) international politics and economics are in upheaval, and (b) AI is sucking up a lot of money and attention in the tech world, leaving less for everything else.

I would love to find a position that lets me continue to work on Rust in this fashion. Rust is an incredible project and technology. It needs and deserves to have people who are paid full-time to maintain it, and I believe I am a good person to do this.

Some numbers

It’s hard to quantify impact, but let’s give it a try. All numbers are correct at the time of writing.

First, let’s start with commits to the rust-lang/rust repository.

• git log says I have made 3,375 commits.
• 560 were from 2016-2020, during my time at Mozilla, where I found ways to contribute to Rust part-time despite not being on the Rust team.
• 2,815 were since I joined the Futurewei team in late 2021.
• This puts me at #16 on the all-time contributors list, which goes back to 2010. It’s #14 if you exclude the #1 and #2 entries which are for a bot and a person that do a large number of merge commits.
• The contributors list includes people who haven’t been active for years. If we restrict it to the last two I am at #6, or #4 after excluding merge commits. (This time window can be selected via a drop-down menu at the top right of the contributors list, though it doesn’t produce a usable link.)

Next, let’s expand consideration to GitHub contributions, which includes (non-merge?) commits and also things like issue creation, reviews, and discussions.

• I am currently the #16 contributor, with 4013 contributions, or #15 if we exclude @bors the bot.
• I don’t know where I ranked when I started at Futurewei, but I would estimate slightly outside the top 100.
• My contribution rate has ticked up over time, and I have been in the top five human contributors to several Rust releases.

Commits and contributions are imperfect measures of impact, for sure. But when the numbers get high enough, I think they provide a decent signal. The other names at the top of these lists are all highly valuable and prolific project members.

Areas of expertise

I was a “compiler contributor” for a long time, which was the designation used for the second tier of contributors, in comparison to the first tier in the “compiler team”.

Last year things were reorganised and I am now a “compiler team member” (“someone who contributes regularly”) and also a “maintainer” (“not only a regular contributor, but are actively helping to shape the direction of the team or some part of the compiler (or multiple parts)”)

I am a member of the primary reviewers group.

I am also a member of the compiler performance working area and the parallel rustc working area.

In terms of the compiler codebase:

• The compiler is over 700,000 lines of code, in the compiler/ directory of the Rust repository.
• I have laid eyes on almost every file in compiler/.
• I have committed changes to 75 of the 77 crates in compiler/.

Some compiler areas where I have particular depth of expertise include the following.

• Compiler performance, profiling and benchmarking
• Lexing and parsing
• Token/AST representation and processing, including macro expansion
• Builtin macro code generation
• Compiler error generation
• Dataflow analysis structure
• CGU splitting

I have also made major contributions to rustc-perf, smaller contributions to rustdoc, clippy, rustfmt, and cargo, and a handful of contributions to external projects like quote, Bevy, cargo-fuzz, cargo-llvm-lines, The Little Book of Rust Macros, thin-vec, rust-smallvec, and c2rust.

Specific contributions

In the Rust community I’m best known for working on compiler performance, and in the past 3.75 years I’ve done a lot of work there. Some highlights:

• I oversaw the compiler performance roadmap in 2022.
• I analyzed the compiler’s performance on the most popular 1000 crates, and made a number of speedups as a result.
• I overhauled declarative macro expansion, giving big speed wins and also making the code simpler and more maintainable.
• I optimized the code generated for derived traits such as Debug, reducing compile times.
• I implemented a new flag -Zmacro-stats to measure proc macro code size and then shrank the size of Bevy’s #[derive(Reflect)] code. This reduced the cargo check time for the bevy_ui crate by 50%!
• I helped with the rustc-perf benchmark suite updates in 2022 and 2025.
• I overhauled Cachegrind’s annotation tools to make them more useful for profiling the Rust compiler and other complex programs.
• I continued writing my long-running “How to speed up the Rust compiler” blog series, with another dozen posts.
• There are far too many individual PRs to mention, but three of my favourites were: ChunkedBitSet and the removal of HybridBitSet; deep `fast_reject (with @lcnr); and a surprisingly massive rustdoc speedup.

I also branched out and did a lot of non-performance work. A lot of this can be classified as “maintainability” or “cleanup” or “refactoring” or “tech debt removal”. I have a knack for it and in a codebase as large and old as the Rust compiler it is always valuable. Some examples:

• I overhauled the internal APIs for generating compiler errors, which are used all over the compiler and were a mess, via 30+ PRs and hundreds of commits. My favourite review comment was this one:

  Thanks for finally making emit consume. You broke the “add 1 to this counter if you tried” situation.

  I.e. I fixed a problem that multiple other people had previously tried and failed to fix. It only took a PR with 14 commits that touched 112 files.

• I greatly simplified the structure of the dataflow analysis passes.
• I removed an awful internal design detail whereby AST nodes could be embedded in tokens. I completed this three years after I first tried, on the third attempt, after a great number of preliminary cleanups.
• I removed save-analysis and compiler plugins, two compiler features that had been deprecated for years but needed someone to push through their removal. These removals then enabled various subsequent simplifications.
• I overhauled and simplified how codegen unit splitting works in the compiler backend.
• I turned on use item formatting within the compiler, a surprisingly controversial change. The PR modified 1,867 files, which is my biggest single PR. I am very happy to no longer have to think how to format use items.
• I simplified compiler/rustdoc startup in a few ways, e.g. one example is here.
• I fixed a ton of inconsistencies in operator representation in tokens and the AST.
• I fixed a lot of places where the empty symbol was misleading used to mean “no symbol”, fixing some bugs along the way. (This is Rust, not C, we have the Option type.)
• I got rid of the ancient P type in the AST. It was a smart pointer type that predated Rust 1.0, and I replaced it with Box.

If I run the following command that summarizes my changes on the repository:

git log --author="Nicholas Nethercote" -p | diffstat

the output is this:

8759 files changed, 145338 insertions(+), 152183 deletions(-)

Negative lines of code! Nice. Fittingly, by far the most common first word in my commit messages is “Remove”, used on 752 of 3,375 commits.

Other activities

Most of my work is around code, but I have also done some other things over the past 3.75 years.

• I gave talks at RustNL 2023, GOSIM 2023, and GOSIM 2024.
• I attended RustConf 2022 and RustWeek 2025 and the co-located unconferences for project members. RustWeek 2025 was especially good, I met and reconnected with a lot of people and I returned home feeling newly energized. (Which makes my losing my job shortly afterward all the more disappointing.)
• I have done a small amount of Rust performance consulting work for ISRG and OpenAI.
• I maintained The Rust Performance Book.
• I did all this while working 100% remotely in Melbourne, Australia, something I’ve done since 2009, sometimes as a contractor, sometimes as an employee.

On the job market

In short: I do a lot of work on Rust. I think it’s valuable. I’d love to be able to keep doing it. If you know of any way that could happen, please get in touch.

I have worked in the industry for almost twenty years. I have worked for Mozilla and Apple. I have a PhD in Valgrind and other publications. I co-won the Most Influential PLDI Paper Award in 2017.

If I can’t find a job that involves me working on Rust, I would like to find a job that uses Rust for interesting ends, preferably in ways that are open source.

I am not interested in any of the following:

• blockchain/cryptocurrencies
• generative AI
• algorithmic trading
• relocating from Melbourne

My contact details and other basic information is here. My LinkedIn profile is here. Thank you for reading this far!