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Best 12 Akka Developers

green golang developers - Best 12 Akka Developers

Akka has grown into a cornerstone toolkit for building concurrent, distributed, and resilient systems on the JVM.

Over the years, a vibrant ecosystem of engineers, open-source contributors, startup founders, bloggers, and champions at large companies has emerged around Akka and the Reactive Manifesto. Below is an updated list of top Akka experts globally (Scala and Java), selected for their open-source leadership, industry impact, thought leadership, and even programming competition accolades.

  1. Jonas Bonér
  2. Patrik Nordwall
  3. Viktor Klang
  4. Sean Glover
  5. Fabio Tiriticco
  6. Hugh McKee
  7. Mary Grygleski
  8. James Roper
  9. Christopher Batey
  10. Johan Andrén
  11. Enno Runne
  12. Renato Cavalcanti

Jonas Boner

YouTube Video

Reactive Microservices

Country: Sweden

Founder of Akka and co-author of the Reactive Manifesto, Jonas created Akka in 2009 and co-founded Lightbend (formerly Typesafe).

As Lightbend’s CTO and now Chairman of Akka, he has been a visionary in advocating Reactive Systems architecture. Under his leadership, Akka became a 12K+ starred project on GitHub, powering countless event-driven applications. Jonas is a Java Champion, frequent keynote speaker, and open-source hacker driving Akka’s evolution (e.g. Akka 3, multi-cloud replication).

Patrik Nordwall

Country: Sweden

As the Tech Lead for Akka at Lightbend, Patrik oversees Akka’s development today.

An early adopter of Scala (coding since 1996), he has been pivotal in evolving Akka’s actor typed API, cluster sharding, and persistence features. Patrik spearheaded recent innovations like Akka’s multi-database sharding for write scalability​. He is a hands-on open-source maintainer (over 40 Akka-related repositories) and regularly shares insights on Akka improvements (e.g. Akka Edge, performance tuning) on Lightbend’s blog and forums.

Viktor Klang

Best 12 Akka Developers

Photo: Jfokus

Country: Sweden

Former Akka Tech Lead at Lightbend, Viktor was one of Akka’s most prolific contributors over a 10-year span.

He shaped the design of Akka’s core and helped introduce Reactive Streams – co-authoring its 1.0 specification. Now an architect in Oracle’s Java Platform Group, Viktor continues to influence concurrency and developer experience at the platform level. He’s known for deep knowledge of Scala futures, API design, and pushing Akka’s integration into Java standards.

A distinguished speaker and blogger, Viktor remains a respected authority on all things concurrent and reactive.

Sean Glover

Country: Canada

Sean is the former lead maintainer of Alpakka Kafka (Reactive Kafka) at Lightbend.

As part of the Fast Data Platform team in Toronto, he helped enterprises stream data from Kafka with Akka Streams. Sean has authored popular talks and papers on streaming design patterns using Alpakka Kafka. He also founded Scala Toronto, fostering Scala/Akka adoption locally. Now a Staff Engineer at a travel tech company, Sean continues to contribute to open source and share Akka knowledge (e.g. “One year with Akka 2.6” presentations).

Fabio Tiriticco

Best 12 Akka Developers

Photo: JOTB2018

Country: Italy

Fabio is a software engineer and community organizer who fell in love with Akka while building a startup​.

Based in Amsterdam, he founded Reactive Amsterdam, a meetup focused on Akka and reactive systems. Fabio is a frequent speaker at conferences (Codemotion, Scala Italy) where he demystifies Akka Streams and Akka Cluster (e.g. comparing Akka Cluster vs. Kubernetes​). He also shares Akka tutorials on Medium, helping newcomers adopt the technology.

Fabio’s passion for Akka and knack for teaching have made him an influential advocate in Europe’s Akka scene.

Hugh McKee

Country: United States

Hugh is a Developer Advocate at Lightbend and author of Designing Reactive Systems: The Role of Actors.

With decades of experience building mission-critical applications, Hugh now focuses on educating architects and devs on Akka and reactive microservices. He frequently speaks at Java User Groups and international conferences, sharing hard-won lessons on resilience (often with humor and war stories). Hugh’s book and talks distill the essence of Akka’s actor model for enterprise audiences. As an advocate, he’s traveled globally to ensure Akka’s best practices (“let it crash”, backpressure, clustering) are understood and embraced by teams modernizing their systems.

Mary Grygleski

Best 12 Akka Developers

Photo: Bulgarian Java User Group

Country: United States

Mary is a Java Pro and passionate Developer Advocate who frequently speaks about Reactive Systems (Akka, Kafka, Pulsar) on the conference circuit.

Formerly at IBM and now at DataStax, Mary has championed open-source technologies that underpin cloud-native streaming systems. While her focus spans multiple technologies, she often covers Akka Streams and the actor model as critical tools for building responsive services. She organizes community events in Chicago and online, and her enthusiasm for “all things reactive” has onboarded many Java developers to Akka.

Mary’s community-building efforts and advocacy have earned her recognition as a thought leader bridging enterprise Java and cutting-edge reactive frameworks.

James Roper

Country: Australia

James is the creator of the Lagom microservices framework and a core contributor to Play Framework.

At Lightbend he later became the architect of Kalix (Akka Serverless), applying Akka under the hood to provide a PaaS for stateful serverless applications. James has been an open-source trailblazer, pushing the envelope of reactive systems on the JVM. Now at Akka (formerly Lightbend), he focuses on making distributed computing more accessible to developers.

James is an active blogger and has given Code Mesh keynotes alongside Jonas Bonér, articulating the future of cloud-native, reactive apps.

Christopher Batey

Best 12 Akka Developers

Photo: JAX London 2018 Session

Country: United Kingdom

Chris is an experienced distributed systems engineer who spent years on the Akka team at Lightbend.

He contributed to Akka Streams and Akka HTTP and worked on optimizing Akka for cloud deployments. Chris is well known for his technical blogging (batey.info) explaining Akka patterns like back-pressure and streaming design. After Lightbend, he moved into financial systems and platform engineering, but remains a vocal Akka advocate.

He has spoken at JAX London and other conferences about building scalable services with Akka.

Johan Andren

Country: Sweden

Johan is a Principal Engineer on the Akka team at Lightbend, with deep roots in the project.

He has spent much of the last decade building core Akka features (from Akka HTTP to the new Akka Serverless platform). Based in Stockholm, Johan is also a frequent speaker (Jfokus, JavaZone) where he gives “whirlwind tours” of Akka and shares new developments. As a maintainer, he’s known for thoughtful answers on Akka forums and for driving Akka’s adaptation to newer JDK features (showcasing Akka with Project Loom, Java 21, etc.).

Enno Runne

Best 12 Akka Developers

Photo: Reactive Summit

Country: Germany

Enno is the Senior VP of Engineering at Akka (Lightbend), leading the teams that build and support the Akka toolkit.

A passionate community organizer, Enno previously led the development of Alpakka, Akka’s integration framework for streaming data. Under his guidance, Akka has expanded to new domains (cloud, edge, serverless) while keeping the community involved. Enno often shares updates at conferences (Jfokus) and online, championing Akka’s “responsive by design” philosophy. With a background in enterprise integration, he ensures Akka remains industrial-grade.

Renato Cavalcanti

ZIO is about making asynchronous and concurrent programming in Scala easier and safer.

Country: Brazil

Renato is a senior Akka engineer at Lightbend, known for his work on Akka Persistence Typed and Akka Projections.

A Scala aficionado since 2009, he has contributed to making event sourcing and CQRS first-class in Akka. Renato frequently speaks at user groups and conferences (Scala Italy, Full Stack Europe) about embracing event-driven architecture with Akka. He’s also part of the team building Kalix (Akka Serverless), bringing cloud-native capabilities to Akka.

Hailing from Brazil and based in Belgium, Renato brings a global perspective and a contagious enthusiasm for distributed systems.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. If you intend to share or make use of it in any way, we kindly ask that you include a backlink to the original source – EchoGlobal.

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