Contact Us
Contact Us

Best 20 MongoDB Developers for Your Projects

mongodb developers - Best 20 MongoDB Developers for Your Projects

MongoDB has become one of the most widely used NoSQL databases in the world – powering everything from high-growth startups to massive enterprise systems.

Behind its success is a vibrant ecosystem of developers, advocates, and engineers who have shaped how Mongo is built, understood, and deployed. This includes core driver maintainers, open-source pioneers, technical authors, cloud platform founders, and performance experts. Below is an updated and curated list of the most influential MongoDB developers and thought leaders, selected for their contributions across engineering, community building, and real-world implementation.

  1. Derick Rethans
  2. Guy Harrison
  3. Mark Paluch
  4. Nic Raboy
  5. Joe Karlsson
  6. Adrienne Tacke
  7. A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
  8. Andreas Braun
  9. Christian Kvalheim
  10. Danielle (Dani) Monteiro
  11. Will Shulman
  12. Peter Farkas
  13. Rick Copeland
  14. Gustavo Niemeyer
  15. Trisha Gee
  16. Lauren Hayward Schaefer
  17. Kristina Chodorow
  18. Dwight Merriman
  19. Robert Stam
  20. Keith Bostic

Now, let’s delve into their remarkable journeys and contributions:

Derick Rethans

YouTube Video

Nationality: Dutch

Derick is a veteran open-source developer who leads the development of MongoDB’s PHP driver and has been a driving force in the PHP and Mongo communities for over a decade.

Derick rewrote and re-engineered the MongoDB PHP driver in 2015, replacing the older extension (originally authored by Kristina Chodorow in 2009) with a new, modern PHP extension and library. He continues to maintain the official PHP driver at MongoDB, ensuring PHP apps can leverage the latest MongoDB features. Aside from MongoDB, Derick is well known as the creator of Xdebug (the popular PHP debugger) and for contributions to PHP’s date/time handling – reflecting his deep expertise in low-level programming. At MongoDB, he’s shared best practices for using MongoDB with PHP and even dabbled in geospatial projects (importing OpenStreetMap into MongoDB).

Derick’s commitment to open source and his dual specialization in PHP internals and MongoDB have made him a trusted authority for PHP developers working with Mongo. He frequently appears at PHP conferences and on podcasts to discuss both PHP and NoSQL topics.

Guy Harrison

Nationality: Australian

Guy is a database performance guru and author who has become a leading voice on Mongo optimization and best practices.

He is the CTO of Southbank Software (ProvenDB) and co-author of the book MongoDB Performance Tuning (2021). With decades of experience in database internals (Guy was a VP of engineering at Oracle’s MySQL division and has authored books on MySQL, Oracle, and next-gen databases), Guy turned his attention to MongoDB as it rose in popularity. He writes the “MongoDB Matters” column for Database Trends & Applications, where he often compares approaches between MongoDB and relational systems. At ProvenDB, he built a blockchain-enabled cloud service on MongoDB, pushing the boundaries of data integrity and security. Guy frequently shares advanced techniques for indexing, scaling, and monitoring MongoDB in webinars and blog posts.

He was an early advocate for MongoDB’s place in enterprise systems and continues to explore its evolving features (like multi-document transactions). His balanced, insightful writing has helped many senior engineers and DBAs successfully adopt MongoDB by learning from his expertise.

Mark Paluch

Mark Paluch - Best 20 MongoDB Developers for Your Projects

Nationality: German

Mark is a key open-source contributor bridging MongoDB with the Java ecosystem.

Based in Germany, he is a Spring Data project lead at VMware and has been a principal engineer on Spring Data MongoDB. Mark has developed critical integrations that allow Java/Spring developers to use Mongo seamlessly, including work on reactive support and the MongoDB Template/Repository abstractions. As an active MongoDB Community Champion, Mark frequently writes and speaks about developer productivity with MongoDB and Spring. He emphasizes clean library design and has helped empower millions of Java developers to adopt MongoDB via familiar Spring paradigms.

In addition to Spring Data, Mark contributes to other open-source projects (like the Lettuce Redis driver) and shares his expertise through conference talks and blogs. His leadership in Spring Data MongoDB has significantly improved the developer experience of using MongoDB in enterprise Java applications.

Nic Raboy

You don’t have to be a database expert to build with MongoDB—you just need to know how your application behaves.

Nationality: American

Nic is a Developer Advocate who has become one of the most visible Mongo influencers through his prolific technical content.

Nic leads the Developer Relations (DevRel) Content team at MongoDB, after having been a Senior Developer Advocate and earning MongoDB’s “MVP” award in 2021. He’s well known as the founder of The Polyglot Developer blog, where he has published hundreds of tutorials on MongoDB integrations with various languages and frameworks (Node.js, Go, Ionic, .NET, etc.). Nic also hosts The MongoDB Podcast, interviewing engineers and showcasing how to build modern apps with MongoDB. His approachable videos and articles (e.g. “Quick Start: Golang & MongoDB”) on MongoDB’s Developer Hub have onboarded countless developers.

With a passion for teaching, Nic combines real coding experience (he’s a former full-stack engineer) with community engagement. He remains an active blogger and speaker, demystifying MongoDB for devs worldwide.

Joe Karlsson

Nationality: American

Joe is a software engineer turned Developer Advocate known for his creative and quirky MongoDB projects that make database technology fun and accessible.

Hailing from Minneapolis, Joe was a Senior Developer Advocate at MongoDB (now at SingleStore) and became a familiar face through his IoT demos – like the “Internet of Things Kitty Litter Box” and a smart fridge that tweets database stats. Joe’s background as a Node.js/JavaScript developer enabled him to build unique open-source integrations (e.g., a MongoDB Bechdel Test analyzer) and speak about them at conferences. He authored numerous tutorials on schema design, MongoDB Atlas, and aggregation pipeline best practices on the MongoDB Developer Hub.

Also a co-creator of community open-source apps, Joe has a knack for showing how Mongo can power anything – from web apps to art projects. His high-energy talks and articles have inspired many developers to tinker with MongoDB in new ways. Even after moving on, Joe remains an active community voice advocating for accessible, inclusive developer education.

Adrienne Tacke

Adrienne Tacke - Best 20 MongoDB Developers for Your Projects

Nationality: Filipina

Adrienne is a Senior Developer Advocate who has been instrumental in MongoDB’s developer education initiatives, especially for .NET and Azure cloud developers.

A Filipina software engineer and published author, Adrienne joined Mongo in 2020 and became a familiar presenter on topics like Atlas cloud, C# integration, and schema design. She is the author of Coding for Kids: Python and a LinkedIn Learning instructor, but also dives into database topics – for example, creating MongoDB .NET integration tutorials and a YouTube series on the Aggregation Framework. Adrienne’s approachable style and “technical storytelling” approach make complex MongoDB features easier to digest.

She has spoken at global events (including Women Techmakers and Microsoft events) advocating MongoDB and encouraging underrepresented groups in tech. With her mix of software engineering experience and passion for teaching, Adrienne has become a key Mongo evangelist helping thousands of developers level up their MongoDB skills.

A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

Nationality: American

A. Jesse is a Senior Staff Engineer at MongoDB who has significantly impacted its Python ecosystem and broader engineering excellence.

Jesse co-created Motor, the asynchronous Python driver for MongoDB, enabling high-performance async operations with Tornado and asyncio. He also contributed extensively to the core PyMongo driver and the MongoDB C driver, and even helped design MongoDB’s official Stable API in version 5.0. Jesse is known for his thoughtful technical writing – he co-authored MongoDB and Python (O’Reilly) and has written influential blog series on topics like Python concurrency using MongoDB. Within Mongo, Jesse has worked on advanced research (MongoDB Labs), tackling distributed systems problems and co-authoring database papers. He is also an emeritus open-source hacker outside of Mongo (contributing to Python’s asyncio and Tornado frameworks).

As a speaker, Jesse has given popular talks on MongoDB’s async capabilities and Python patterns. His blend of deep database internals knowledge and Python expertise make him one of the most respected voices for MongoDB in the Python community.

Andreas Braun

Nationality: German

Andreas is a Senior Engineer at Mongo DB who bridges the gap between the MongoDB core and the PHP developer community.

Based in Germany, Andreas works on MongoDB’s PHP driver (extension) and the PHP library, and he’s a longtime member of the Doctrine Project team that maintains the Doctrine MongoDB ODM. In the PHP world, he’s known by his handle “alcaeus” and has been crucial in ensuring MongoDB’s PHP tooling remains top-notch. For instance, Andreas wrote the mongo-php-adapter that helped ease the transition from the old PHP driver to the newer one. At MongoDB, he is the Lead Engineer for PHP connectivity, often contributing C code to the extension as well as PHP code for the userland library. He also frequently helps developers on forums like Stack Overflow and GitHub, answering questions about MongoDB’s PHP usage.

Andreas’s dual role as a Mongo engineer and open-source maintainer means he’s shaped features ranging from BSON type handling to the integration with Symfony bundles. He embodies MongoDB’s commitment to open source, advocating for community needs and keeping PHP a first-class citizen in the MongoDB ecosystem.

Christian Kvalheim

Christian Kvalheim - Best 20 MongoDB Developers for Your Projects

Nationality: Norwegian

Christian “Chris” authored the official MongoDB Node.js driver and was one of the earliest engineers at 10gen focused on developer connectivity.

As MongoDB’s Node Driver Lead and Evangelist, Christian created mongodb-native, the Node.js driver, starting in 2009 – enabling Node developers to interact with Mongo in JavaScript. His work was critical in MongoDB’s adoption in the Node/JavaScript community, laying the foundation for frameworks like MEAN. Christian not only built the driver but also actively maintained it for years, guiding it through major API redesigns and performance improvements. He wrote tutorials, gave talks, and engaged with the Node community to promote MongoDB usage. After MongoDB, Christian continued working in tech (including founding a fintech startup).

His open-source contributions (which also include MongoDB-related projects like the Mongoskin library) and early evangelism earned him recognition as a major influencer in MongoDB’s growth. Today, the MongoDB Node driver (and its ecosystem) still bears the mark of Christian’s initial architectural decisions and focus on developer ergonomics.

Danielle (Dani) Monteiro

Nationality: Brazilian

Danielle is a data architect and community leader who has received international recognition for her MongoDB expertise and advocacy.

In 2019, Dani became the first Brazilian woman to speak at MongoDB World, where she won a MongoDB Innovation Award and was named “MongoDB Female Innovator”. With a background as a DBA and cloud solutions architect, she has deployed MongoDB solutions in production at scale and often shares her real-world insights. Dani founded DANI Academy to train developers in data technologies and runs the DB4Beginners blog to teach database basics (relational and NoSQL). She’s also a Google Developer Expert (Cloud GDE) and Microsoft MVP, reflecting her multi-faceted expertise. As a MongoDB Champion, Dani frequently speaks about topics like using Mongo in AI projects and mentors new developers, especially women and minorities in tech.

Her journey – from winning coding awards in Brazil to co-leading user groups – has made her a role model in the global MongoDB community. Dani continues to lead as both a hands-on architect (Head of Data & AI at a chatbot startup) and an educator who empowers others to succeed with MongoDB.

Will Shulman

Nationality: American

Will is a tech entrepreneur who played a pivotal role in MongoDB’s early cloud adoption as the co-founder and CEO of mLab (MongoLab).

He launched MongoLab in 2011 as one of the first Database-as-a-Service platforms for MongoDB, offering hassle-free hosting and scaling for MongoDB in the cloud. Under Will’s leadership, mLab’s service was embraced by developers on Heroku, AWS, and Azure – at one point it hosted over half a million Mongo databases. Will’s vision “to make developers more productive” by offloading DB ops paid off. In 2018, MongoDB, Inc. acquired mLab, integrating its cloud expertise into MongoDB Atlas. Will joined MongoDB as a VP of Product, bringing along his deep understanding of developer needs and cloud reliability.

Prior to MongoLab, he had already co-founded another successful company (Merced Systems) as CTO. Will remains a respected figure for having foreseen the shift to managed cloud databases early on. His efforts not only helped countless startups get started with MongoDB easily, but also accelerated MongoDB’s own journey to the cloud.

Peter Farkas

Peter Farkas - Best 20 MongoDB Developers for Your Projects

Nationality: Hungarian

Peter is the co-founder and CEO of FerretDB, an open-source project that is building a truly open, MongoDB-compatible database alternative.

Ferret DB  implements the Mongo wire protocol on top of PostgreSQL, allowing developers to use MongoDB drivers with Postgres under the hood. Peter and his team launched FerretDB in 2021 as a response to MongoDB’s license change, aiming to “bring MongoDB back to open source.” A seasoned entrepreneur, Peter previously co-founded software companies and has a background in database products. Under his leadership, FerretDB has rapidly gained traction as a MongoDB substitute for those who prefer Apache 2.0 licensed software. Peter is deeply involved in the coding – the FerretDB GitHub shows him as a top contributor – and in community outreach, often speaking about database freedom and how FerretDB handles MongoDB features.

In 2023, Peter’s FerretDB team joined forces with database veterans like Peter Zaitsev (Percona founder) to further advance the project. By marrying the ease-of-use of MongoDB with the robustness of Postgres, Peter Farkas is pushing innovation in the document database space and advocating for open collaboration in the database community.

Rick Copeland

Nationality: American

Rick is a Python developer and author who helped pioneer using MongoDB in Python applications.

He created MongoEngine, a popular Python ORM-like library for MongoDB, and Ming, another MongoDB ODM for Python. Rick’s deep knowledge of Python data modeling and MongoDB led him to write the book MongoDB Applied Design Patterns (2013), which became a go-to guide for developers modeling schemas in MongoDB. In that book and in talks, he distilled his experience migrating large systems (he helped move SourceForge from SQL to MongoDB) and demonstrated patterns for one-to-many, tree structures, and other data relationships on MongoDB. Rick was an early MongoDB Master and spoke at MongoDB events about schema design trade-offs. He also has contributed to the MongoDB ecosystem by maintaining and improving ODM tools that make MongoDB more Pythonic.

These days Rick runs a consulting/training firm but remains active in the community, often training teams on Python and Mongo best practices. His work significantly influenced Python’s MongoDB landscape, proving that Mongo could be used for complex, scalable apps in the Python world.

Gustavo Niemeyer

Nationality: Brazilian

Gustavo is renowned for creating the mgo driver for Go, which was the dominant community-driven MongoDB driver for Go developers for many years.

An engineer at Canonical at the time, Gustavo started the mgo project in 2010 when official MongoDB support for Go was lacking. The driver was praised for its idiomatic API and performance – many Go enthusiasts considered it one of the best database drivers in Go (a testament to Gustavo’s skill in API design). He maintained mgo largely alone for 7+ years, updating it through numerous MongoDB versions and features. MongoDB’s documentation even listed mgo as a supported community driver. Gustavo eventually stepped back in 2017, but his work laid the groundwork for MongoDB’s own Go driver. Beyond mgo, Gustavo has an illustrious open-source résumé (he’s one of the creators of Ubuntu’s Upstart init system and other tools).

His contributions enabled Go adoption in the Mongo world at a critical time, and many production Go systems still use forks of mgo today. Gustavo demonstrated how one passionate developer could serve an entire language community’s needs and influenced MongoDB Inc. to officially support Go.

Trisha Gee

Trisha Gee - Best 20 MongoDB Developers for Your Projects

Nationality: British

Trisha is a Java engineer and educator who was a prominent Developer Advocate at MongoDB during the mid-2010s, helping shape the Java driver and engaging the Java developer community.

Prior to her advocacy role, Trisha had over a decade of experience in high-performance Java and even worked on the MongoDB Java driver redesign around the 3.0 release. She delivered popular tutorials like “Getting Started with Mongo and Java” and published blog posts explaining the new MongoDB driver’s design goals. Trisha’s knack for breaking down complex topics meant she was also a sought-after speaker – she gave keynotes and talks globally on combining MongoDB with Java technologies, and even on using the reactive features.

After MongoDB, Trisha joined JetBrains as a Java advocate, and she’s authored books like Head First Java. But her impact at MongoDB was significant: she helped thousands of Java devs transition from relational mindsets to MongoDB’s document model. Trisha remains an influential voice in software development, and her time at MongoDB stands out for building bridges between the company and the vast Java community.

Lauren Hayward Schaefer

Nationality: American

Lauren is a software engineer-turned-advocate who has been a prominent teacher and content creator in the MongoDB realm.

At MongoDB, Lauren led the Instructional Advocacy team, producing some of the most widely read tutorials and videos on the MongoDB Developer Hub. She wrote the multi-part “SQL to MongoDB” migration guide, helping SQL developers grasp MongoDB concepts, and authored MongoDB University courses on schema design and aggregation. Lauren’s prior experience as an IBM software engineer and her natural communication skills make her adept at showing how to integrate MongoDB with other technologies (she’s written about using MongoDB with Spark, Xamarin, and more). She frequently speaks at meetups and on podcasts about women in tech and developer careers, sharing her MongoDB knowledge along the way.

Lauren is also an inventor with multiple patents and a technical speaker (JavaOne, etc.). After a stint outside, she recently rejoined MongoDB to work on Developer Community programs. Her friendly, clear teaching style has demystified MongoDB for thousands of developers, making her one of the most recognizable faces in MongoDB’s developer outreach.

Kristina Chodorow

MongoDB makes it easy to scale, but only if you understand the consequences of your design decisions.

Nationality: American

Kristina was one of the earliest engineers at 10gen and made foundational contributions to MongoDB’s development and documentation.

She created the first version of the Mongo PHP driver in 2009 and later led the sharding team, building key parts of MongoDB’s sharding and replication infrastructure. Kristina was a tireless evangelist for MongoDB in its startup days: she answered countless questions on the user forums, wrote blog posts simplifying complex features, and authored several O’Reilly books that educated the first wave of MongoDB developers – including MongoDB: The Definitive Guide (co-author) and 50 Tips and Tricks for MongoDB Developers. Her book Scaling MongoDB distilled lessons on performance and was one of the first to explain sharding in approachable terms. In the community, Kristina was known for her accessible explanations (often using witty analogies) and her commitment to open source.

After leaving MongoDB, she continued to develop software at places like Google, but her legacy at MongoDB remains indelible. Many early MongoDB adopters have cited Kristina’s books and talks as the reason they successfully got Mongo into production.

Dwight Merriman

Dwight Merriman - Best 20 MongoDB Developers for Your Projects

Nationality: American

Dwight is the co-founder of MongoDB and served as its first CEO and later Chairman.

A visionary developer-turned-entrepreneur, Dwight wrote significant portions of MongoDB’s early code alongside Eliot Horowitz, applying lessons from his time as co-founder/CTO of DoubleClick to build a new kind of database. Even as an executive, Dwight remained remarkably hands-on – MongoDB engineers from the 10gen days recall that “Dwight sits with the engineers and actually writes more code than most of us”. He led the company through its pivot from a PaaS offering to focusing purely on the database, a move that proved crucial. Under his technical leadership, features like automatic sharding and the BSON data format were solidified. Dwight’s insistence on developer productivity and his mantra of “solving problems our way” (non-relationally) set MongoDB’s course.

He eventually stepped back from coding as MongoDB grew, but he continued to guide strategy as board chairman. A legend in the New York tech scene, Dwight is known for his humility and passion – he has been spotted debugging code with a beer in hand among junior developers. His code, vision, and mentorship were foundational to MongoDB’s success.

Robert Stam

Nationality: American

Robert is the lead engineer behind MongoDB’s official C#/.NET Driver and has been the principal point of contact for .NET developers using MongoDB for over a decade.

Joining 10gen in its early years, Robert brought his extensive experience in C# and Windows development to ensure MongoDB had first-class support on the Microsoft stack. He architected the MongoDB C# driver from scratch and has maintained it through numerous versions, adding support for LINQ queries, reactive streams, and the latest .NET features. Robert’s work allows .NET developers to interact with MongoDB in a natural, idiomatic way (e.g., using LINQ syntax to build queries). He’s also handled Windows-specific server integrations and contributed to the MongoDB GUI tools for Windows. Beyond coding, Robert often helps users on the MongoDB C# forums and has written documentation and blog posts for .NET consumption of new MongoDB features (like multi-document transactions).

His careful design of the driver’s API has made MongoDB a popular choice among .NET shops, effectively opening MongoDB to the vast enterprise developer audience. Robert continues to lead the .NET driver team at MongoDB, constantly improving performance and keeping up with .NET ecosystem changes.

Keith Bostic

Nationality: American

Keith is a legendary software engineer whose work has significantly influenced MongoDB’s storage engine technology.

Keith co-founded WiredTiger, the high-performance storage engine that MongoDB acquired in 2014 and made the default in Mongo DB 3.2. As a Distinguished Engineer at MongoDB, Keith was a co-architect of the WiredTiger engine, bringing features like document-level locking and compression that dramatically improved MongoDB’s scalability. Keith’s pedigree is impressive: he was also a co-creator of Berkeley DB at Sleepycat (acquired by Oracle) and was part of the UC Berkeley CSRG team that developed BSD Unix. At MongoDB, he has continued to innovate on WiredTiger (e.g., tuning it for new hardware, enabling multi-document transactions) and mentor the storage-engine team. His depth of experience in database internals and filesystems has been invaluable in making MongoDB enterprise-grade.

Keith frequently speaks at academic and industry conferences (CMU’s Databaseology lectures, MongoDB World) about storage design. In an industry where few can claim to have written two widely used database engines, Keith Bostic stands out – and Mongo’s modern reliability and performance owe much to his work.

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?