Contact Us
Contact Us

Hire 12 Elite API Developers

api developers - Hire 12 Elite API Developers

From groundbreaking open-source creators and startup founders still deep in code, to elite competitive programmers and engineers building infrastructure at global tech giants, this list highlights the top minds driving innovation in API development today.

Whether it’s REST, GraphQL, gRPC, or custom protocols, these developers have redefined how APIs are built, consumed, and maintained. Below is a ranked list of the world’s best API developers, chosen for their lasting impact across tooling, performance, design, and developer experience.

  1. Kelsey Hightower
  2. Kamil Myśliwiec
  3. Jon Skeet
  4. Feross Aboukhadijeh
  5. Matteo Collina
  6. Junio C. Hamano
  7. Jessica Frazelle
  8. Evan You
  9. Kin Lane
  10. Brad Fitzpatrick
  11. Guido van Rossum
  12. Anders Hejlsberg

Now, let’s delve deeper into their achievements and contributions:

Kelsey Hightower

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Principal Engineer at Google Cloud and famed developer advocate, Hightower has been a key figure in the Kubernetes and cloud-native API movement.

He co-authored Kubernetes: Up and Running and has given countless talks teaching developers about containers, microservices, and API management. Kelsey’s unofficial role as a “translator” between complex cloud tech and developers has made technologies like Kubernetes more accessible.

Until retiring from Google at end of 2022, he worked on products for config management and serverless platforms. Though not known for writing code in open-source repos, Hightower’s influence on API developers is immense through education and community leadership. He has shaped how developers design cloud APIs and deploy distributed systems. For example, his live demos (like “No YAML Kubernetes”) and GitHub examples have guided best practices in using Kubernetes APIs.

Kamil Mysliwiec

Nationality: Polish

Creator of NestJS, a fast-growing Node.js framework for building scalable server-side applications. Myśliwiec, from Poland, introduced NestJS in 2017 with a focus on TypeScript and a modular architecture inspired by Angular. It provides a robust platform for building REST and GraphQL APIs in Node. Kamil has continued to lead NestJS’s development (now part of Narwhal Technologies) and often speaks about Node.js design patterns.

NestJS has over 50k GitHub stars and is widely used in enterprise Node projects. Kamil Myśliwiec filled a crucial gap in the Node ecosystem by creating an architecture-ready framework that embraces TypeScript and OOP patterns, making enterprise Node API development more approachable. By combining ideas from front-end and back-end, NestJS gives developers a structured way to build APIs. Kamil’s work is significant for bringing the productivity of frameworks like .NET or Spring to the Node world.

Jon Skeet

Jon Skeet - Hire 12 Elite API Developers

Nationality: British

Staff Software Engineer at Google and the highest-reputation user on Stack Overflow (over 1.4 million rep).

Skeet is a C# and .NET expert, author of C# in Depth, and creator of the Noda Time library (an alternative date/time API for .NET). He joined Stack Overflow in 2008 and has answered over 34,000 questions – 1.5% of all C# answers on the site by himself! Jon works on Google Cloud’s .NET client libraries and sits on the .NET Foundation’s board. Jon Skeet is the quintessential knowledge-sharing engineer.

His deep understanding of API design in C# (and Java) has influenced frameworks and educated an entire community. Noda Time, for example, is praised for its clear API around the notoriously tricky date/time domain. But Skeet’s biggest impact is through Stack Overflow: by helping developers with API usage and edge cases for over a decade, he’s improved the quality of .NET code everywhere.

Feross Aboukhadijeh

Nationality: American

An American developer known for many inventive JavaScript projects: he created WebTorrent (BitTorrent via WebRTC), StandardJS (JavaScript style guide/tool), and a suite of Node.js libraries.

Feross has been a contributor to Node core and a prolific package author. In 2020, he founded Socket.dev, a security startup focused on detecting supply chain attacks in open-source packages. He also produces educational content (e.g., YouTube series “The Programming with Feross”).

Feross exemplifies the open-source innovator who transitions to solving larger problems. His projects like WebTorrent pushed the boundaries of browser APIs and P2P protocols, proving what web APIs can do in the client. StandardJS influenced how many JS developers write and lint their code. Now, with Socket.dev, he’s addressing API security at the package level, which has become critical given recent attacks.

Matteo Collina

Matteo Collina - Hire 12 Elite API Developers

Nationality: Italian

A Node.js core contributor and Architect at NearForm, Collina is the lead maintainer of Fastify (a high-performance Node.js web framework) and Pino (fast JSON logger).

He has contributed to Node’s streams API and is known for expertise in messaging and MQTT (author of the Mosca broker). Matteo earned a Ph.D. in concurrent programming and often speaks at Node and JS conferences. Collina’s contributions focus on making Node.js APIs faster and more efficient. Fastify, which he co-authored, is designed for extremely low overhead routing and JSON serialization, giving Node developers a tool to build APIs with best-in-class performance. As a Node TSC member, Matteo influences the evolution of Node’s core API.

Junio C. Hamano

Nationality: Japanese

The longtime maintainer of Git, the version control system that underpins almost every software project’s workflow – and thus indirectly, most API development.

Junio took over from Linus Torvalds in 2005 and has stewarded Git for 18+ years. He has authored thousands of commits to Git, reviewing and merging contributions that shaped features like shallow clones, submodules, and the HTTP/HTTPS smart transport protocols. He works for Google and continues to guide Git’s evolution quietly from behind the scenes.

Every API developer uses Git, and Junio Hamano’s meticulous care ensures that this critical “API of APIs” remains reliable. Under his maintainership, Git’s own command-line API has stabilized and expanded to meet user needs. Junio’s dedication exemplifies open-source maintenance at scale – he’s balanced contributions from a global community while keeping the project consistent and ultra-stable.

Jessica Frazelle

Jessica Frazelle - Hire 12 Elite API Developers

Nationality: American

A notable open-source contributor in the container ecosystem, Jess was a core maintainer of Docker and has worked at Docker Inc., Microsoft, and GitHub on Kubernetes and container security.

She became famous for “running all the things in containers” (even GUI apps), pushing Docker’s limits. Jess has contributed to Kubernetes, written tools like subd and dotfiles, and is currently the CTO of Oxide Computer Company (building open hardware+software systems).

Jess Frazelle’s work has bridged low-level systems and developer-facing APIs. As a Docker maintainer, she shaped one of the most important APIs for software distribution – Docker’s CLI and image format. Her advocacy for containers on the desktop presaged technologies like Docker Desktop and sandboxed apps. At GitHub, she worked on improving the security of the software supply chain, influencing the APIs of package registries and container registries.

Evan You

Progressive enhancement isn’t just a design principle. It’s a strategy for adoption.

Nationality: Chinese

Creator of Vue.js, the progressive JavaScript framework, and founder of Vite (build tool). Evan built Vue in 2014 as a side project (after working at Google Creative Labs), and it grew into one of the “big three” front-end frameworks. Vue’s gentle learning curve and versatile core made it popular for SPAs and also powering API-driven sites.

Evan later created Vite, a lightning-fast dev server and build tool leveraging native ES modules, which has been widely adopted (now part of Vercel). He runs Vue as an open-source project with community support via Patreon. While Vue.js is a front-end technology, its influence on API consumption (and even creation via SSR or serverless) is huge. Evan You showed how a single developer can innovate in a space dominated by big companies (React by Facebook, Angular by Google). Vue’s design has informed how developers structure REST and GraphQL calls from the client side.

Kin Lane

Kin Lane - Hire 12 Elite API Developers

Nationality: American

Known as the “API Evangelist”, Kin Lane has been a prolific blogger and consultant advocating for web APIs for over a decade. Through his site APIEvangelist.com, Lane analyzed trends in API design, management, business models, and politics.

He also served as Chief Evangelist at Postman and worked in the U.S. government on the federal API strategy. Kin continues to publish insights on API practices and is now leading API operations at Postman. Kin Lane has arguably done more than anyone to document and disseminate best practices in API design. His early work (around 2010–2015) educated many companies on the importance of RESTful APIs, developer portals, and API governance. His inclusion highlights the influential tech content creator who, though not known for code, has shaped how APIs are built and managed industry-wide.

Brad Fitzpatrick

Nationality: American

A veteran software engineer at Tailscale (previously at Google), Brad is best known for creating LiveJournal (early blogging platform) and memcached (distributed caching) in the early 2000s. At Google, he was a key contributor to Go – implementing critical parts of Go’s standard library (HTTP/2, crypto, etc.) and co-authoring the Camlistore/Perkeep data store. He also developed the popular OAuth2 Proxy.

In 2020, after a decade on Go’s core team, Brad joined Tailscale to work on secure networking software. Fitzpatrick’s impact spans low-level services and high-level developer tools. Memcached became a staple for scaling web APIs (caching database results), and it pioneered the now-common practice of distributed caching. His contributions to Go directly improved the APIs available to Go developers – from crypto libraries to HTTP clients/servers, which underpin countless Go-based APIs. Additionally, Brad’s ethos of simplicity and performance can be seen in everything he builds.

Guido van Rossum

Guido van Rossum - Hire 12 Elite API Developers

Nationality: Dutch

The creator of the Python programming language (first released 1991) and its benevolent dictator for life until 2018. After a brief retirement, Guido joined Microsoft in 2020 to work on Python’s performance. In the past two years he spearheaded the PEG parser for Python 3.9+ and helped plan performance improvements for Python 3.11 (which delivered 25–60% speed boosts).

Van Rossum’s work in the 2000s on Web frameworks (he created Python’s WSGI standard) and recent contributions keep Python highly relevant for API development. As the author of Python, Guido van Rossum has indirectly shaped an enormous number of APIs – Python is a top language for building web services (with Django, Flask, FastAPI) and consuming APIs for data science.

His philosophy of simplicity and readability in Python’s design has influenced the design of many API interfaces in other languages.

Anders Hejlsberg

Nationality: Danish

A legendary language engineer, Hejlsberg designed Turbo Pascal in the 1980s, led creation of Delphi in the 90s, and then at Microsoft became the chief architect of C# and the .NET framework (2000s). In the last decade, Anders applied his talents to JavaScript by creating TypeScript (first released 2012), Microsoft’s typed superset of JS that has been widely adopted to build large-scale APIs and applications.

He remains at Microsoft, actively guiding TypeScript’s evolution and participating in the TC39 JavaScript standards committee. Few individuals have influenced developer tools and APIs at a fundamental level across generations. C# and .NET brought a powerful, enterprise-friendly API stack that still evolves.

And with TypeScript, he improved the reliability of countless web APIs by introducing static types to JavaScript – profoundly impacting how APIs are implemented.

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. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

Ready to get started?