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14 Elixir Developers Changing the Game

elixir developers - 14 Elixir Developers Changing the Game

Elixir has grown into one of the most beloved functional programming languages, largely due to the tireless work of an exceptional global community.

This includes core team contributors, innovative open-source tool creators, startup founders coding on the frontlines, top engineers scaling Elixir in enterprise environments, and educators inspiring the next generation of functional programmers. Below is an updated and curated list of some of the most influential Elixir developers worldwide, recognized for their deep technical contributions, community leadership, and lasting impact on the BEAM ecosystem.

  1. Wojtek Mach
  2. Ben Wilson
  3. Bruce Tate
  4. Sophie DeBenedetto
  5. Brooklin Zelenka
  6. Parker Selbert
  7. Michał Muskała
  8. Andrea Leopardi
  9. Marlus Saraiva
  10. Boyd Multerer
  11. Bruce Williams
  12. Jason Fertel
  13. Devon Estes
  14. Jonatan Kłosko

Now, let’s delve deeper into their remarkable journeys and lasting impacts.

Wojtek Mach

YouTube Video

Nationality: Polish

Wojtek Mach is an Elixir core team member and the creator of several important developer tools, such as Req and Livebook Desktop. He has been a key maintainer of foundational libraries: a member of the Ecto SQL team, co-maintainer of Hex, and contributor to ExDoc.

In the last few years, Wojtek introduced MyXQL and, as part of Dashbit, helped companies adopt Elixir by improving libraries like Finch and Telemetry. Wojtek’s work might not always make headlines, but it profoundly impacts developer experience: whether it’s making HTTP requests more joyful, ensuring package management is reliable, or providing an easy on-ramp for new Elixirists via better docs and tools. He exemplifies the unsung heroes who polish the ecosystem to a shine.

Ben Wilson

GraphQL is a compelling choice, and while we’ll often touch on why, we’ll move on to actually building things with it rather quickly.

Nationality: American

Ben Wilson is the other half of the duo behind Absinthe and co-author of the Pragmatic book on GraphQL in Elixir. He served as Lead Backend Engineer at CargoSense, where Absinthe was born, and later as CTO.

Ben has been deeply involved in expanding Absinthe’s capabilities – including the introduction of the Absinthe schema notation, middleware system, and a powerful test infrastructure for GraphQL queries. In the last few years, he has worked on Absinthe’s integration with Phoenix (Absinthe Plug) and contributed to community support on the Elixir Forum and Slack, answering GraphQL questions. Wilson also appears on podcasts like Thinking Elixir to discuss GraphQL vs REST trade-offs with Elixir. Currently, he continues to maintain Absinthe and its ecosystem and collaborates with the community on feature requests.

Bruce Tate

Bruce Tate - 14 Elixir Developers Changing the Game

Nationality: American

Bruce Tate is an award-winning author and the founder of Grox.io, an Elixir training platform. After a prominent career writing books like Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, Adopting Elixir, and Designing Elixir Systems with OTP, Bruce turned his focus to “giving back” through education.

In the last few years, he co-authored Programming Phoenix LiveView and has been actively running training courses, workshops, and the Groxio content service to grow the Elixir community. Tate is also a conference organizer (helping with ElixirConf and Code BEAM events) and a frequent speaker, renowned for his engaging storytelling that weaves in software wisdom. With 10+ years of functional programming experience, Bruce’s leadership and passion for teaching have onboarded countless developers to Elixir and fostered a supportive community environment.

Sophie DeBenedetto

I think Elixir has a pretty gentle learning curve for people coming from other backgrounds. It’s really easy to get excited about Elixir as a developer, to start solving problems really quickly and efficiently, and once you start stacking up those wins you get hooked on learning more and building more.

Nationality: American

Sophie DeBenedetto is a staff engineer at GitHub and a prominent voice in the Elixir community. She co-authored Programming Phoenix LiveView (Pragmatic Bookshelf) and has written extensively on Elixir and Phoenix, both on her blog and as an AppSignal guest author.

In the past three years, Sophie has contributed to open source  and co-hosted the Beam Radio podcast, where she discusses Elixir’s evolution. She is passionate about coding education, having been an instructor at the Flatiron School before her Elixir career. DeBenedetto frequently speaks at conferences and on podcasts about LiveView and beginner-friendly Elixir patterns. Through her writing and teaching, Sophie has helped many developers (especially newcomers) embrace functional web programming with Elixir’s modern tools.

Brooklin Zelenka

Brooklin Zelenka - 14 Elixir Developers Changing the Game

Nationality: Canadian

Brooklin Zelenka (also known as “expede”) is a co-founder of Fission and a prolific open-source contributor in the Elixir ecosystem. She created Witchcraft, an Elixir library that brings functional programming abstractions into the language.

Brooklin is also involved in BEAM research at the intersection of blockchain and distributed systems, having worked on Ethereum smart contract tooling and UCAN auth protocols. Over the last few years, Zelenka has given keynotes and talks globally about advanced functional patterns and “local-first” software, bridging the gap between academic concepts and industrial Elixir use. An advocate for community, she helped organize the Vancouver Elixir and functional programming meetups. Brooklin’s blend of deep technical insight and entrepreneurial spirit has pushed Elixir into new domains like decentralized and local-first applications.

Parker Selbert

Nationality: American

Parker Selbert is the developer behind Oban, Elixir’s most popular background job processing framework. Oban, which leverages PostgreSQL for queuing and persistence, has become a critical piece of infrastructure for many Elixir applications.

In the past three years, Parker has grown Oban into a robust, enterprise-ready system – introducing features like job isolation, dynamic scaling, and a plugin system for extensibility. He co-founded Soren, a small consultancy, to provide commercial support and an “Oban Pro” extension, demonstrating a successful open-source sustainability model. Selbert is active in the community, sharing Oban’s architecture in talks and on podcasts, and recently co-authored content on scaling Oban for large applications.

Michał Muskała

Nationality: Polish

Michał Muskała has been a key contributor to Elixir’s ecosystem, known for his work on the Ecto SQL library and the Jason JSON parser. A former member of the Elixir core team, Michał’s focus has been on performance and internals – he has contributed optimizations to the Elixir compiler and runtime, and even worked on an alternative BEAM implementation.

In recent years, Muskała transitioned to working on the Erlang/OTP team at WhatsApp, where he improves the BEAM’s tooling while still engaging with the Elixir community. He frequently speaks about advanced topics like garbage collection, and his blog posts are highly regarded. Michał’s open-source libraries and his continued behind-the-scenes contributions have had a significant impact on Elixir’s efficiency and reliability.

Andrea Leopardi

Andrea Leopardi - 14 Elixir Developers Changing the Game

Nationality: Italian

Andrea Leopardi is an Elixir core team member and co-author of Testing Elixir: Effective and Robust Testing for Elixir and its Ecosystem (PragProg, 2021). On the core team, Andrea has contributed to improvements in the language’s tooling and documentation, especially around ExUnit and mix.

He’s passionate about testing practices – his book and talks cover how to leverage Elixir’s concurrency in test suites and how to design for maintainability. In the last few years, Leopardi has also taught at workshops and mentored developers. Online, he’s known by his handle “whatyouhide” and shares insights on topics like making all tests async or network programming in Elixir. Currently an engineer at Apple, Andrea continues to be a community reference for writing clean, well-tested Elixir code. His contributions ensure that as the language grows, developers have solid guidance and tools for quality assurance.

Marlus Saraiva

Nationality: Brazilian

Marlus Saraiva has been at the forefront of improving developer experience in Elixir’s web and data-processing arenas. He created Surface, a component-based server-side UI library for Phoenix LiveView, bringing a more structured, React-like feel to LiveView development.

Surface introduced compile-time checking for LiveView components and influenced upcoming LiveView API improvements. Marlus is also a co-creator of Broadway, the concurrency framework for processing data streams, which is used for building data pipelines in Elixir. In addition, he developed ElixirSense. As part of Dashbit’s engineering team, Saraiva has in the past 3 years worked on integrating Surface’s ideas into Phoenix and written about advanced LiveView patterns. He often appears in panel discussions to discuss the future of LiveView components. Marlus’s contributions have greatly enhanced productivity for Elixir developers, from web UIs to background processing, making complex tasks simpler and more “Elixir-ish.”

Boyd Multerer

Boyd Multerer - 14 Elixir Developers Changing the Game

Nationality: American

Boyd Multerer is a former Microsoft engineer who founded Xbox Live and XNA, now turned Elixir enthusiast responsible for creating Scenic, a functional UI framework for Elixir. Scenic enables native GUI development on the BEAM, opening Elixir to use-cases like kiosk interfaces and instrumentation displays.

Multerer released Scenic in 2018 and has continued to improve it, recently ensuring compatibility with the latest LiveView and incorporating more drivers. Boyd also founded Kry10, a company building a secure operating system with Elixir and the seL4 microkernel, aiming to bring the BEAM’s fault tolerance to mission-critical devices. He frequently speaks about the intersection of safety, security, and the BEAM. Multerer’s decades of experience combined with his fresh work in Elixir has inspired many to realize that Elixir isn’t just for web servers – it can power UIs and operating systems.

Bruce Williams

Nationality: American

Bruce Williams is co-creator of Absinthe, the GraphQL toolkit for Elixir, and co-author of the book Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir. As the CTO of CargoSense, Bruce adopted Elixir early and built one of the first production GraphQL systems on the BEAM.

Over the past few years, he has continued to guide Absinthe’s development, which includes a rich GraphQL schema DSL, subscriptions for real-time updates, and a supportive community. Williams also created supporting libraries like Dataloader and contributed to the broader ecosystem. A polyglot and language enthusiast, Bruce frequently speaks at conferences about API design, Elixir’s metaprogramming, and balancing idiomatic Elixir with GraphQL needs.

Jason Fertel

Jason Fertel - 14 Elixir Developers Changing the Game

Nationality: American

Jason Fertel introduced Elixir at PepsiCo’s e-commerce engineering division, making the global Fortune 50 company one of Elixir’s highest-profile users. In 2016, he built PepsiCo’s first Elixir-based application, which proved so successful that it was integrated company-wide and opened the door for Elixir adoption across multiple teams.

As an engineering manager, Jason championed Elixir for its productivity and scalability, even speaking about it on podcasts and at ElixirConf 2019. Over the last few years, he led a team that scaled PepsiCo’s internal Elixir services and helped hire and mentor Elixir developers in a traditionally enterprise environment. Fertel’s efforts showed that Elixir can deliver value in fast-paced corporate projects, not just startups. By paving the way at PepsiCo, he has inspired other large companies to consider Elixir for their high-performance backends.

Devon Estes

Nationality: American

Devon Estes is an Elixir engineer and blogger known for pushing the language to its performance limits and then sharing the results. He maintains Benchee, the benchmarking library widely used to compare Elixir code performance, and was a maintainer of the Elixir track on Exercism, helping newcomers learn idiomatic Elixir.

In recent years, Devon has published a series of insightful blog posts covering topics like OTP performance tips, compiler optimizations, property testing, and more. He’s a frequent guest on podcasts (Elixir Wizards, Thinking Elixir) where he discusses how to write fast and reliable Elixir – often challenging assumptions and digging into BEAM internals. Estes has also contributed code to libraries (for example, helping improve Enum functions and writing the Muzak mutation testing tool).

Jonatan Kłosko

Nationality: Polish

Jonatan Kłosko is the primary developer behind Livebook, the innovative web-based notebook platform for Elixir. Still early in his career, Jonatan astonished the community by creating a polished product that enables code notebooks (à la Jupyter) powered by Elixir’s runtime.

In the last three years, he has relentlessly improved Livebook with features like multi-user collaboration, custom smart cell extensions, integration with Nx for visualizing data, and even deploying Livebook to embedded devices. Kłosko also developed Bumblebee, a library that brings pre-trained machine learning models to Elixir, often used through Livebook’s UI. He works at Dashbit alongside José Valim, contributing to Nx and other ML tooling as well.

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.

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