Note that that would be increasing the number for pay, you already have many people who have the relevant qualifications because they’re already doing the work, just only in their spare time.

Second, the compiler team has put a ton of effort into mentorship infrastructure, and you can go from not knowing a ton to being a productive member of the team with their help. It "just" takes time and desire to do it.

Interesting. What sort of mentorship infrastructure? What sort of people are they targeting for mentorship?

I'd love to learn about compilers by working on an actual real world compiler, but I really only know high level details about how different components fit together. I also don't have a formal CS education, although I am currently working as a senior level data engineer. Not sure if that is the sort of person they are looking to mentor.

rust-lang/rust on github, go to issues, and click on the "easy" and/or "mentor" labels. That will show you all the easy tasks with a mentor available.

Just find one that you'd like to work on, write that you are going to work on it, and start doing the work, and asking lots of questions.

Or on some other project.

Sure, there are probably some projects for which if the primary author leaves, their coworkers will drop it or rewrite it in another language, but for others the management will realize what a liability it was to have all of their eggs in that one basket and they’ll have to hire 2 to replace them.

If you steal 25 to work on the kernel, you will likely see 25 open reqs to replace them. And more people will work with languages that they have seen reqs for.

There are a lot of people out there who can do this kind of work. I know a lot of such people. Many of them don't have traditional CVs.

Yes, most of them are employed. Some are under-employed. Some are well employed but might be keen to work on a project this important.

There are certainly way more than 25 skilled programmers who are experts in compilers that could be hired easily by offering enough money (on the order of several hundred thousand dollars per year).