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Top 14 GraphQL Experts for Flexible APIs

graphql experts - Top 14 GraphQL Experts for Flexible APIs

The GraphQL ecosystem is driven by a vibrant community of engineers, open-source contributors, and technical leaders.

We spotlight key figures shaping GraphQL — from its original creators and open-source leaders to startup founders, educators, and engineers scaling it globally.

  1. Sashko Stubailo
  2. Andi Marek
  3. Uri Goldshtein
  4. Benjie Gillam
  5. Marc-André Giroux
  6. Michael Staib
  7. Joe McBride
  8. Dotan Simha
  9. Tanmai Gopal
  10. Ivan Goncharov
  11. Peggy Rayzis
  12. Oleg Ilyenko
  13. Syrus Akbary
  14. Robert Mosolgo

Now, let’s delve deeper into their backgrounds and accomplishments, along with links to their online profiles:

Sashko Stubailo

YouTube Video

Nationality: American

Sashko is an early GraphQL pioneer who was the tech lead of the Apollo open-source team during Apollo’s formative years.

At Meteor Development Group, Sashko helped create Apollo Client and the Apollo Stack as a data layer for modern apps, co-authoring the initial versions of Apollo’s GraphQL client library. He also integrated GraphQL into Meteor and drove community adoption through countless blog posts and examples. Sashko later worked as an engineering manager at Stripe, but his influence on GraphQL remains through the tools he built. He has a knack for explaining complex concepts in simple terms – for example, he gave many talks demystifying GraphQL caching and state management.

Sashko’s work significantly shaped how JavaScript developers use GraphQL on the client side, making it more accessible to adopt GraphQL in React and other frontend frameworks.

Andi Marek

Nationality: German

Andreas “Andi” is the founder and lead maintainer of GraphQL-Java, the dominant GraphQL implementation for the Java ecosystem.

An engineer at Atlassian, Andi created GraphQL-Java in 2016 to bring GraphQL’s capabilities to JVM developers. He also co-created Spring GraphQL, integrating GraphQL into the Spring Framework. Andi is an active member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee, contributing to the official GraphQL spec discussions.

His work has enabled enterprises like Atlassian to adopt GraphQL at scale on the JVM, and he frequently speaks about GraphQL design from a strongly-typed language perspective.

Uri Goldshtein

GraphQL isn’t just a query language — it’s an enabler of collaboration between frontend and backend.

Nationality: Israeli

Uri is the founder of The Guild, which is the largest open-source group in the GraphQL ecosystem.

The Guild maintains many popular GraphQL tools, including GraphQL Code Generator, GraphQL Mesh, and GraphQL Modules. Uri has been a driving force in the GraphQL community, previously working on Apollo’s early stack before forming The Guild to further democratize GraphQL development. Under his leadership, The Guild has contributed extensively to GraphQL’s growth, consolidating and improving libraries used by thousands of developers.

Uri also serves on the GraphQL Foundation’s board, helping steer the project’s governance.

Benjie Gillam

Benjie Gillam - Top 14 GraphQL Experts for Flexible APIs

Nationality: British

Benjie is a community-funded open-source developer best known as the creator of PostGraphile (formerly PostGraphQL), an instant GraphQL API layer for PostgreSQL databases.

He is a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee and often described as a “GraphQL community gardener.” Through five years of attending the GraphQL Working Group, Benjie has become a key contributor to the GraphQL spec – reviewing proposals and helping other engineers advance their ideas. He also maintains Graphile Engine and related projects enabling high-performance GraphQL servers in Node.js.

Benjie’s work lowers the barrier to entry for GraphQL in the database layer and exemplifies community-driven innovation in GraphQL tooling.

Marc-André Giroux

Nationality: Canadian

Marc-André is the author of Production Ready GraphQL (2020) and a respected voice on GraphQL API design.

He has served on GraphQL platform teams at major companies – previously at GitHub and Shopify, and currently as a senior engineer on Netflix’s GraphQL platform team. Marc-André shares extensive knowledge about schema design, persistence, and scaling GraphQL through his writings and conference talks. He was an early adopter at GitHub, helping launch the GitHub GraphQL API, and has since contributed back to the community with advice on best practices for evolving GraphQL schemas.

Marc-André’s work bridges practical industry experience with community education, making GraphQL more approachable for teams new to the technology.

Michael Staib

Michael Staib - Top 14 GraphQL Experts for Flexible APIs

Nationality: German

Michael is the author of Hot Chocolate, a modern GraphQL server for .NET, and co-founder of ChilliCream (the company behind Hot Chocolate).

He is a Microsoft MVP and a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee. Michael launched Hot Chocolate in 2018 to provide a fully-featured GraphQL runtime for C#/.NET, enabling .NET developers to build GraphQL APIs with ease. Under his guidance, Hot Chocolate introduced features like schema stitching and a new GraphQL Fusion for distributed GraphQL, pushing the .NET GraphQL ecosystem forward.

Michael frequently speaks at conferences and delivers training on GraphQL in .NET, sharing his passion for strongly-typed GraphQL backends.

Joe McBride

Nationality: American

Joe is the creator of GraphQL .NET, the leading GraphQL implementation for the .NET ecosystem.

In 2015, shortly after GraphQL’s public release, Joe pioneered the GraphQL library for C# by porting the reference implementation, enabling the entire Microsoft/.NET community to build GraphQL APIs. His project, GraphQL for .NET, has since grown with dozens of contributors and is used in production by companies running on the .NET stack. Joe has also built related .NET GraphQL tooling (like the GraphQL.Server libraries) and remains an active maintainer guiding the project’s evolution. His work significantly accelerated GraphQL’s spread into enterprise backends.

Joe is a polyglot developer (with experience in JavaScript, Swift, etc.) and an active Stack Overflow contributor who has answered many GraphQL questions for the community.

Dotan Simha

Nationality: Israeli

Dotan is the creator of GraphQL Code Generator, a widely used tool that automatically generates type-safe code from GraphQL schemas and operations.

He is the CTO of The Guild and has developed many GraphQL tooling innovations. Dotan’s work on GraphQL Code Generator has improved developer productivity and API safety across numerous frontend and backend stacks. He’s also a core maintainer of GraphQL Hive (a schema registry) and has contributed to GraphQL Mesh.

As an open-source leader, Dotan actively shares his expertise through talks on GraphQL gateways, schema stitching, and other advanced topics.

Tanmai Gopal

Tanmai Gopal - Top 14 GraphQL Experts for Flexible APIs

Nationality: Indian

Tanmai is the co-founder and CEO of Hasura, the open-source GraphQL engine that gives developers instant realtime GraphQL APIs on their databases.

A true full-stack polyglot, Tanmai has built developer tools in React, Node.js, Python, Haskell and more. Under his leadership, Hasura’s GraphQL tooling has simplified backend development for tens of thousands of developers by automating the creation of GraphQL APIs. Tanmai also has a strong educational bent – he was an instructor of India’s largest programming MOOC, “IMAD,” which taught over 250,000 students online.

He remains an active contributor to Hasura’s open source codebase and a frequent speaker advocating for GraphQL and developer productivity.

Ivan Goncharov

Nationality: Ukrainian

Ivan is a long-time GraphQL open-source contributor and spec maintainer who helped standardize how GraphQL is used over HTTP.

He co-authored the “GraphQL over HTTP” specification, which the GraphQL Foundation adopted to formalize GraphQL HTTP request/response patterns. Ivan co-founded APIs.guru (an open API directory) and later worked as an OSS engineer at Apollo GraphQL, focusing on GraphQL tools and standards. He has been a member of the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee since its inception, playing a crucial role in reviewing and approving changes to the GraphQL spec.

Ivan also contributed extensively to GraphQL.js (the reference implementation in JavaScript) – in 2019, the GraphQL Foundation sponsored his work on maintenance of the core library and spec. His efforts ensure GraphQL’s continued stability and interoperability across implementations.

Peggy Rayzis

Peggy Rayzis - Top 14 GraphQL Experts for Flexible APIs

Nationality: American

Peggy is a prominent GraphQL advocate and was the Director of Developer Experience at Apollo GraphQL.

She led Apollo’s developer relations and education team for years, helping grow Apollo’s open-source community. Prior to her DevRel leadership, Peggy was an engineer on Apollo’s open-source team working on Apollo Client – contributing code to one of the most widely used GraphQL client libraries. She has published numerous tutorials, guided Apollo’s documentation overhaul, and spoken at conferences worldwide about GraphQL best practices. Peggy is known for “creating more value than she captures” – amplifying underrepresented voices in the community and mentoring new GraphQL developers.

In 2023, she founded a developer marketing advisory business, continuing to help tech companies (including GraphQL startups) craft great DX.

Oleg Ilyenko

Nationality: Ukrainian

Oleg was the primary creator of Sangria, the GraphQL implementation for Scala that has been used by companies like Twitter, The New York Times, and Coursera.

He developed Sangria in 2015, making it one of the earliest non-JavaScript GraphQL servers, and it influenced GraphQL’s adoption in the JVM/Scala community. At Twitter, Oleg served as a GraphQL expert, helping the platform migrate to a federated GraphQL architecture. He was also a co-founder of GraphQL Conf in Europe and an active open-source mentor. Oleg’s prolific contributions – from creating the Sangria library to answering countless GraphQL questions online – demonstrated both technical genius and kindness (as noted by many in the community).

Oleg Ilyenko passed away in 2019, but his legacy lives on in the GraphQL ecosystem he helped pioneer.

Syrus Akbary

Syrus Akbary - Top 14 GraphQL Experts for Flexible APIs

Nationality: Spanish

Syrus is the creator of Graphene, the first full-featured GraphQL framework for Python, and he has been instrumental in bringing GraphQL to the Python community.

An entrepreneur and engineer, Syrus founded Graphene in 2015 and later co-founded Wasmer (WebAssembly startup) but continued to support GraphQL-Python. Graphene’s success (and related libraries like Graphene-Django) has made GraphQL a top choice for Python web APIs. Syrus is also known for his contributions to GraphQL IDEs and for authoring library integrations in multiple languages.

He often shares insights on bridging GraphQL with other technologies (REST, gRPC, etc.) and has spoken at GraphQL and Python conferences about building GraphQL servers in a Pythonic way.

Robert Mosolgo

Nationality: American

Robert is the creator and maintainer of graphql-ruby, the de facto GraphQL implementation for Ruby applications.

He developed the graphql Ruby gem in 2015, allowing the Ruby/Rails community to seamlessly build GraphQL APIs. Robert later joined GitHub as a senior engineer, where he helped integrate GraphQL into GitHub’s platform (GitHub’s public GraphQL API runs on graphql-ruby). He is a prolific open-source maintainer, releasing frequent updates to graphql-ruby and related gems to support new GraphQL features. Known for his thoughtful blog posts and documentation, Robert has guided countless Ruby developers in adopting GraphQL.

He remains an active voice in the GraphQL community, often sharing how GraphQL can improve API design in traditional web frameworks.

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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