Despite sacking staff left and right – by two percent compared to last year – the Windows maker is still hiring. In this case, the company wants a team of Rustaceans to switch its platform from C#.

The job, a top software architect for Microsoft 365, has duties that include "leading technical direction, design and implementation of Rust component libraries, SDKs, and re-doing existing global scale C# based services to Rust."

According to the post, spotted by MSPowerUser, the job is in the Substrate App Platform group, part of the Microsoft 365 Core Platform team. The Substrate does the hard work behind the scenes for Microsoft's cloud services, making a rewrite into Rust a big deal.

Microsoft said: "We are forming a new team focused on enabling the adoption of the Rust programming language as the foundation to modernizing global scale platform services, and beyond."

The company has been keen on Rust for a while. In 2023, the boss of OS security for Windows announced the arrival of Rust in the Windows kernel and the language has been popping up in multiple parts over the years.

Microsoft, along with companies such as Meta and AWS, is a platinum member of the Rust Foundation. Considering the growing craze for memory-safe programming, something Rust does with much less hassle than the likes of C++, Microsoft's move is not shocking. But the company's wish to shift existing C#-based services to Rust will make some developers wonder.

Famously, a Microsoft engineer had to quickly backtrack issue a clarification after bragging that Office 365 was being ported to JavaScript. In this case, while Microsoft still sticks to C#, at least in public, its actions over the last few years and the job post are signs that the company is keeping its eyes open.