Microsoft is building a team of Rust developers, both for internal work and collaboration with the community.

Rust is a relatively new programming language. Syntactically, it’s similar to C++, but is designed to offer better safety, especially in how it handles memory management and concurrency. The language was originally created by a developer at Mozilla, with the organization taking a leading role in its development. Much of Mozilla’s Rust team was laid off in 2020, amid the 250 employees let go.

Since then, some of the biggest names in tech have been snapping up the Rust developers that were laid off. Microsoft is the latest, posting a job listing for a Rust Principle Software Engineer.

The job listing makes it clear the engineer will work on internal systems, as well as collaborating with the Rust open source community. The engineer will be part of a newly formed team within the company.

In this role you’ll work closely with product groups around Microsoft to gather requirements and develop tooling improvements for Rust. You’ll join a newly formed team with a vision to support Rust at Microsoft while also collaborating and sharing those improvements with the broader Rust OSS community.

You’ll be working along with some of the most talented engineers in Microsoft on important internal systems programming workloads.

Microsoft and other big companies’ support is good news, both for the Rust language, as well as for the developers laid off by Mozilla.