Jess Izen is an Engineer in Residence for the Rust Foundation, seconded full-time by Amazon Web Services (AWS). She focuses on supply chain hardening and other engineering work involving infrastructure and community libraries beyond the Rust compiler and standard library. She wears many additional hats, as a member in the Rust Project and maintainer of various Rust crates in the networking and observability domains.

Jess’s background is somewhat unusual: She ran a bicycle messenger company in Richmond, Virginia, and was involved with building their online ordering platform for food delivery. She fell in love with software engineering in the process and ultimately became a distributed systems engineer for AWS focused on anti-DDoS and bot control. Her newest love is open source communities and cares deeply about systems building autonomy and financial sustainability for open source maintainers.