Best 15 Software Developers in Brazil
Explore Brazil’s leading software developers ranked by skill, impact, and innovation. Find standout talent for your next tech project. ↓
Brazil is a rising tech powerhouse with a vibrant community of software engineers making global impacts.
From programming language creators to open-source leaders, startup CTOs, tech educators, and coding champions, Brazilian developers are excelling across domains. Below is a curated (and ranked) list of the top software developers in Brazil, recognized for their coding contributions in open source, entrepreneurial leadership (while still coding), influential tech content, roles at major companies, or international programming competitions:
- Gilberto Titericz
- Bruno Oliveira
- Roberto Ierusalimschy
- Fabiane Bizinella Nardon
- Fabio Akita
- Gustavo Niemeyer
- Otávio Santana
- Bruno Souza
- Mario Filho
- Loiane Groner
- Diego Fernandes
- Filipe Deschamps
- Felipe Fialho
- Eduardo Habkost
- Henrique Bastos
Now, let’s delve deeper into their backgrounds and accomplishments, along with links to their online profiles:
Gilberto “Giba” Titericz
Gilberto is a data scientist renowned for his dominance on Kaggle, the premier machine learning competition platform.
Entirely self-taught in AI, Giba was the #1 ranked Kaggle competitor globally for over 2 years, amassing dozens of gold medals across challenges in computer vision, NLP, and analytics. This competition prowess led him to engineering roles at Airbnb and NVIDIA. In recent years, he’s continued to inspire Brazil’s AI community – still in Kaggle’s top ranks and speaking at ML conferences – while developing cutting-edge AI products.
Giba exemplifies how Brazilian talent can conquer global data science contests through skill and perseverance.
- LinkedIn: Gilberto Titericz
- Kaggle: titericz
- X (Twitter): @Giba1
Bruno Oliveira
Bruno is a software developer best known as a core maintainer of the pytest framework, Python’s dominant testing library.
Using the handle “nicoddemus”, he has spent years expanding pytest’s capabilities (including spearheading full type annotations in a recent release). Bruno also authored the PyTest Quick Start Guide and regularly speaks about testing best practices. By day, he leads engineering projects at ESSS (a tech company in Brazil), but he devotes significant time to open source mentoring and maintenance.
His contributions have improved code quality for countless Python developers, and he’s a visible leader in Latin America’s Python community – encouraging others to contribute and organizing PyBrasil meetups.
- LinkedIn: Bruno Oliveira
- X (Twitter): @nicoddemus
- GitHub: nicoddemus
Roberto Ierusalimschy
Roberto is a computer scientist best known as the creator and chief architect of the Lua programming language.
He has guided Lua’s development since its inception in 1993, making it one of the world’s fastest and lightest scripting languages (embedded in everything from game engines to Adobe Photoshop). A professor at PUC-Rio, he authored Programming in Lua and received the Brazilian Computer Society’s Scientific Merit Award in 2013.
Under Roberto’s leadership, Lua’s minimalist design has achieved global popularity, demonstrating Brazil’s contributions to programming language innovation.
- LinkedIn: Roberto Ierusalimschy
- GitHub: roberto-ieru
Fabiane Bizinella Nardon
Fabiane is a computer scientist who has spearheaded massive data systems in Brazil.
She was the chief architect of the São Paulo Health Information System, the world’s largest Java EE application, which won the 2005 Duke’s Choice Award. Fabiane led the JavaTools community on java.net, where 800+ open-source projects were born under her guidance. A Java Champion, she co-founded toolscloud.com and was Chief Data Scientist at Tail (ad-tech startup), applying machine learning at scale.
Fabiane now directs data platform engineering at TOTVS (Brazil’s biggest tech firm), focusing on simplifying big data development. She remains a mentor and speaker, frequently seen at JavaOne and data conferences.
Fabiane’s career blends hands-on building of impactful systems with leadership in community and industry – inspiring many Brazilian developers, especially women in tech.
- LinkedIn: Fabiane Nardon
- X (Twitter): @fabianenardon
- GitHub: fabianenardon
Fabio Akita
Fabio is a software developer and tech influencer who played a pivotal role in popularizing Ruby on Rails in Brazil.
Co-founder of Codeminer 42 (a major Brazilian software consultancy), Akita has organized RubyConf Brazil and runs a hugely popular Portuguese tech YouTube channel “Akitando”. He’s been blogging as “AkitaOnRails” since the mid-2000s, educating a generation of devs on Rails and web development. In recent years, his YouTube content on software engineering, tech history, and career advice has exploded in popularity, earning him a 2024 Ruby Community Award.
Fabio continues to code and lead projects at Codeminer 42, embodying the mix of hands-on skill and community building that makes him one of Brazil’s most influential dev voices.
- X (Twitter): @AkitaOnRails
- Github: akitaonrails
- Website/Blog: akitaonrails.com
Gustavo Niemeyer
Nationality: Brazilian
Gustavo is an open-source veteran and CTO at Canonical (Ubuntu Linux’s parent company).
He co-conceived Juju, Canonical’s cloud orchestration tool, in 2009 , later leading its reimplementation in Go and writing much of its core. Gustavo is also known for creating the Go YAML parser and other Go libraries, and earlier contributions to the Linux desktop and Python communities. Based in Brazil’s far south, he became Canonical’s Chief Technology Officer while continuing to “hack” on code – proving that one can reach tech leadership without leaving hands-on work.
With 20+ years in open source, he’s mentored many and shown that Brazilian engineers can drive infrastructure technology on a global scale.
- LinkedIn: Gustavo Niemeyer
- X (Twitter): @gniemeyer
- GitHub: niemeyer
Otavio Santana
Otávio is an award-winning software engineer and a Java Champion known for his work in the Java EE/Jakarta EE ecosystem.
He has led and contributed to multiple Java specification requests – most notably as project lead for Eclipse JNoSQL (bringing NoSQL databases support to Jakarta EE). Otávio has served as a JCP Executive Committee member and is a strong open-source advocate, helping unify the Java and NoSQL worlds with standardized APIs. He’s also active in the community as a founder of Brazil’s JavaBahia user group and a frequent conference speaker.
Currently an “OS Expert” at a tech company, Otávio remains hands-on – from coding cloud-native Java applications to authoring articles – earning him accolades like Oracle ACE and Microsoft MVP.
- LinkedIn: Otavio Santana
- X (Twitter): @otaviojava
- GitHub: otaviojava
- Website/Blog: otaviojava.com
Bruno Souza
Known as the “JavaMan” in Brazil, Bruno has been a tireless advocate for Java developers since 1995.
He co-founded SouJava, Brazil’s largest Java User Group (and one of the world’s biggest), helping it become a force that influenced Oracle to open-source Java. Bruno has served on the JCP (Java Community Process) Executive Committee and pushed for developer interests in Java’s evolution. Always seen with his Java Duke mascot, he’s traveled globally to speak at JavaOne and user groups, all while coding and consulting on cloud and server-side Java projects. His motto of helping developers improve their careers has made him a mentor to many.
Bruno’s mix of technical chops and community passion earned him the Duke’s Choice Award and recognition as one of the world’s top Java evangelists.
- X (Twitter): @brjavaman
- LinkedIn: Bruno Souza
- GitHub: brunosouza
Mario Filho
The more I hear from people that did high-impact stuff in ML, the less I believe in some stroke of genius. They are clearly smarter than average, but it’s mostly about persistence and doing the work.
Mario is a self-taught machine learning expert who became a Kaggle Competitions Grandmaster, once ranking 12th globally out of 180,000+ data scientists.
He achieved multiple 1st-place wins in Kaggle contests (including predicting network failures and online sales) and parlayed that into industry success – leading data science at Upwork and other firms. Mario is passionate about teaching AI: he runs a YouTube channel and blog in English to help others enter competitive ML, and has published courses on how to approach Kaggle problems. Based in São Paulo, he continues to compete occasionally while serving as an AI advisor.
Mario’s journey from learning online to top-tier Grandmaster showcases Brazil’s growing presence in the AI/ML arena.
- LinkedIn: Mario Filho
- X (Twitter): @mariofilhoml
- Kaggle: mariofilho
- Website/Blog: mariofilho.com
Loiane Groner
Loiane is a versatile developer and a prominent technical author/trainer.
A Google Developer Expert in Web/Angular and Microsoft MVP, she has written 12 programming books (on subjects like JavaScript Data Structures & Algorithms, Sencha Ext JS, and Angular) with translations in multiple languages. Loiane has been coding since her teens and currently works as a Senior Engineer (and dev manager) at Citibank in São Paulo. She also runs Loiane.training – offering free courses to tens of thousands of Brazilian students – and shares tutorials on her blog.
Balancing enterprise work with community teaching, Loiane has become a reference in Brazil’s front-end and Java communities, proving one can be both a high-level developer and an impactful educator.
- LinkedIn: Loiane Groner
- X (Twitter): @loiane
- GitHub: loiane
- Website/Blog: loiane.com
Diego Fernandes
Diego is the co-founder and CTO of Rocketseat, one of Brazil’s leading coding education startups.
A front-end/Node.js expert, he’s an enthusiast of the latest web/mobile technologies and is “passionate about education and changing lives through programming”. Diego not only oversees Rocketseat’s tech platform but also personally creates and teaches much of their curriculum (covering React, React Native, Node, etc.) to hundreds of thousands of devs. Under his technical leadership, Rocketseat grew a massive online community of Brazilian developers.
Despite running a company, Diego remains hands-on with code – live-coding on streams, contributing on GitHub, and answering students’ questions. He exemplifies the new wave of tech founders in Brazil who still love to code every day while scaling a business.
- LinkedIn: Diego Fernandes
- X (Twitter): @dieegosf
- GitHub: diego3g
Filipe Deschamps
Filipe (known as “Felipe” in his channel) is a developer turned tech influencer who has arguably Brazil’s most popular programming YouTube channel (800k+ subscribers).
Formerly a software engineer in fintech, he started making videos to simplify programming and “make you fall in love with coding”. He live-coded an AI assistant for his home and built open-source projects with his community (like “Poliglot” for translations). Filipe co-founded an online learning platform and often streams coding sessions, during which he contributes to projects on GitHub with followers. While most of his content is in Portuguese, his impact on educating young Brazilian coders is enormous.
He continues to code daily, leading initiatives like BrasilAPI (open APIs for Brazilian services) and encouraging collaboration. Filipe’s success shows the power of grassroots tech education through new media.
- LinkedIn: Filipe Deschamps
- X (Twitter): @felipedeschamps
- GitHub: filipedeschamps
- YouTube: Filipe Deschamps
Felipe Fialho
Felipe is a front-end engineer known for his prolific open-source contributions in web development.
Currently a Staff Engineer and Tech Lead in São Paulo (recently at Juntos Somos Mais and now CTO at Buser), he’s created or co-created dozens of OSS projects – from CSS Libraries and boilerplates to the popular Front-end Challenges repository for learning (which has thousands of stars on GitHub). Felipe also maintains “Awesome Made by Brazilians”, highlighting Brazilian OSS projects. As a community leader, he founded Front-End Brasil forum and has written many articles (Medium) about workflow and tooling. He’s been working in front-end since 2009 and is now mentoring teams while still actively coding.
Felipe’s dedication to sharing knowledge has made him a reference among Brazilian web developers.
- LinkedIn: Felipe Fialho
- X (Twitter): @felipefialho_
- GitHub: felipefialho
- Website: felipefialho.com
Eduardo Habkost
Eduardo is a principal engineer known for his work on Linux’s virtualization stack.
As a long-time QEMU maintainer (since 2009) at Red Hat, he has maintained critical subsystems like the x86 CPU emulator, NUMA, and memory management. He also contributed to the KVM hypervisor and Linux kernel, helping improve cloud computing infrastructure. Eduardo started out at Conectiva (Brazil’s early Linux distro) and has 15+ years in low-level systems programming. He’s a regular speaker at KVM Forum and has written posts breaking down QEMU internals on his blog. In 2021 he moved to DigitalOcean, continuing to work on open-source virtualization for cloud VMs.
Eduardo’s behind-the-scenes coding has enabled much of the cloud tech we use today, and he’s part of the unsung Brazilian talent in global open-source infrastructure.
- LinkedIn: Eduardo Habkost
- GitHub: ehabkost
- Blog: habkost.net
Henrique Bastos
Henrique is a distinguished software engineer and one of Brazil’s most influential Python educators.
A Fellow of the PSF and DSF (Python and Django Software Foundations), he has been promoting Python adoption in Brazil since the 2000s through events like PythonBrasil and DjangoCon. Henrique created the well-regarded “Welcome to the Django” free course, and through his training company he has taught 10,000+ developers in Python, Django, TDD, and agile skills. He’s also an active open-source contributor and was a maintainer of the Brisa framework.
Currently a Principal Engineer at a fintech startup, Henrique still dedicates time to mentoring, blogging and local meetups. His genuine care for people and clarity in teaching have been essential in building Brazil’s strong Python community.
- LinkedIn: Henrique Bastos
- X (Twitter): @henriquebastos
- GitHub: henriquebastos
- Website: henriquebastos.net
Wrap Up
These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals in Brazil 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.
Tags: coders, developers, engineers, experts, professionals
Lou Reverchuk IT Entrepreneur