Russell Cohen
Software Engineer at AWS
Melrose, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarRussell Cohen is a software engineer based in Melrose, MA with 11 years of experience building reliable back-end systems and developer tooling. He currently writes Rust at AWS and has contributed notable features to high-profile open-source projects like tokio (adding robust async write_all_buf functionality) and the aws-sdk-rust codegen. Russell’s work spans code generation (smithy/smithy-rs), protocol correctness and testing, CLI tooling for log processing, and CI/CD automation for projects like Semgrep, showing a blend of deep systems programming and pragmatic automation. He routinely bridges language boundaries—modifying Kotlin and Rust in codegen pipelines—and focuses on correctness, test coverage, and developer ergonomics. Colleagues would recognize him for shipping production-critical features and improving the reliability of both libraries and release workflows.
11 years of coding experience
Github Skills (41)
asynchronous10
unit-testing10
json-parser10
json10
api-rest10
static-code-analysis10
github-ci10
docker10
static-analysis10
api-design10
scripting10
async10
restful-api10
api-client10
testing10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
smithy-lang/smithy-rs
Oct 2020 - Jan 2023
Code generation for the AWS SDK for Rust, as well as server and generic smithy client generation.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 releases, 1674 reviews, 580 commits in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Russell focused on implementing and maintaining code generation for the AWS SDK for Rust. They made significant contributions to the builder generation process, including creating builders for structures, incorporating support for nested maps, and addressing issues related to optional fields and data structures. Their work primarily involved modifying Kotlin and Rust code within the codegen project, as well as making contributions to a test and example infrastructure.
awsaws-sdk-rustrust
rcoh/angle-grinder
Feb 2018 - Dec 2022
Slice and dice logs on the command line
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 releases, 34 reviews, 421 commits in 4 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Russell primarily focused on developing and implementing the core functionality of the angle-grinder command-line application. Their work involved creating new data types and operators, specifically for handling JSON data. They implemented a parser for JSON data and included unit tests to ensure the functionality of their code. Additionally, the user contributed towards the implementation of aggregators within the application.
analyticscli-apprustslicelogging
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.