LATAM Tech Talent: 17 Leading Software Developers

Latin America is increasingly making its mark in the global tech industry, thanks to innovative software developers who excel in open-source projects, startup leadership, competitive programming, community building, and major tech company roles.

Below is a curated list of the most prominent and currently active software developers from LATAM (spanning multiple countries and disciplines) – selected for their recent contributions in the last couple of years. These individuals have distinguished themselves through open-source contributions, founding or leading tech startups (while still coding), winning international coding competitions, influencing developer communities, or delivering significant engineering work at top tech companies.

1. Guillermo Rauch
2. Miguel de Icaza
3. José Valim
4. Fernando Pérez
5. Juan Benet
6. Gilberto “Giba” Titericz
7. Bruno Oliveira
8. Miguel Grinberg
9. Fabio Akita
10. Nicolás Bevacqua
11. Álvaro Videla
12. Felipe Hoffa
13. Tania Allard
14. Julián Duque
15. Gabriela de Queiroz
16. Óscar Toledo Gutiérrez
17. Luis von Ahn

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

Guillermo Rauch

Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch on AI and the Future of Coding.

Nationality: Argentine (Argentinian)

Guillermo is a software engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the founder and CEO of Vercel, the company behind Next.js.

An early champion of open-source, Rauch created popular Node.js libraries like Socket.IO and Mongoose (for MongoDB) before co-designing Next.js. After his first startup was acquired by Automattic, he founded Vercel to build a platform for high-performance web deployment, which now powers sites for companies like The Washington Post and Nintendo. Rauch has been an active tech speaker and author (he wrote Smashing Node.js), and he continues to drive innovation in the web development community.

• Linkedin: Guillermo Rauch
• X (Twitter): rauchg
• GitHub: rauchg
• Website/Blog: rauchg.com

Miguel de Icaza

Nationality: Mexican

Miguel is an open-source pioneer, famous for co-founding the GNOME desktop environment in 1997 and later starting the Mono project (an open-source .NET framework) and Xamarin (for cross-platform mobile development).

His visionary work on GNOME helped establish one of Linux’s most popular GUIs, and Mono/Xamarin enabled C# applications on Linux, iOS, and Android well before Microsoft’s official support. After Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, de Icaza became a Distinguished Engineer there. He has received numerous accolades (including the MIT TR100 award) and is recognized as a founding figure in Latin America’s FOSS movement.

Even after leaving Microsoft in 2021, he remains active in the tech scene as an angel investor and advisor, continuing to advocate for open-source development.

• LinkedIn: Miguel de Icaza
• X (Twitter): migueldeicaza
• GitHub: migueldeicaza
• Blog: tirania.org

Jose Valim

Nationality: Brazilian

José is the creator of the Elixir programming language and a prominent software engineer. A former Rails core contributor, Valim designed Elixir (first released in 2012) to run on the Erlang VM, combining Ruby-like productivity with Erlang’s scalability.

Today Elixir is used in large-scale systems worldwide (financial services, telecommunication, etc.), and Valim’s company Dashbit (which he co-founded) helps organizations adopt Elixir in production. He remains Elixir’s Benevolent Dictator, overseeing its evolution (such as recent work on type systems) and engaging with the open-source community. Valim is also known for authoring programming books and for winning the prestigious Erlang User of the Year award.

His work has cemented Brazil’s reputation in the global programming language design arena.

• LinkedIn: José Valim
• X (Twitter): josevalim
• GitHub: josevalim

Fernando Perez

Nationality: Colombian

Fernando is a Colombian-American software developer and scientist, best known as the creator of IPython and co-founder of Project Jupyter.

His work revolutionized interactive computing for data science: IPython (started in 2001) evolved into the Jupyter Notebook, now a staple tool for millions of researchers and engineers. Pérez’s contributions earned him the 2017 ACM Software System Award for Jupyter. He is a faculty member at UC Berkeley, where he continues to bridge academia and open source. In the last two years, Pérez has been active in initiatives to make AI and data tools more accessible, and he’s a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation.

His leadership in the PyData community (and as a co-director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science) keeps him at the forefront of scientific software development.

• LinkedIn: Fernando Perez
• X (Twitter): fperez_org
• GitHub: fperez
• Website/Blog: fernandoperez.org

Juan Benet

Nationality: Mexican

Juan is a computer scientist and entrepreneur, famous for inventing the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and founding Protocol Labs. IPFS, created in 2014, is a peer-to-peer protocol to make the web decentralized, and it has become a core technology in the Web3 and blockchain ecosystem.

Benet also created Filecoin, a cryptocurrency-powered decentralized storage network. Under his leadership, Protocol Labs (a Y Combinator alum) has grown into a large R&D lab advancing internet protocols. Benet studied at Stanford and moved to the U.S., but remains an inspiration in Latin America’s tech scene. In the past two years, he led Filecoin’s mainnet launch and continues to oversee improvements to IPFS that impact millions of users.

His work has earned him recognition globally as an Internet visionary.

• LinkedIn: Juan Benet
• X (Twitter): juanbenet
• GitHub: juanbenet

Gilberto “Giba” Titericz

Nationality: Brazilian

Gilberto is a data scientist renowned for his dominance on Kaggle, the premier platform for machine learning competitions.

Largely self-taught in AI, Giba was ranked the #1 data scientist on Kaggle for over two consecutive years, earning dozens of gold medals in challenges ranging from computer vision to predictive analytics. His competition success led him to a career at Airbnb and then NVIDIA, where he currently works on AI products. In the last couple of years, Titericz has continued to contribute to the Kaggle community (he’s still in the global top 50 and speaks at AI conferences to inspire other Latin American engineers.

He exemplifies how talent from Brazil can impact the cutting-edge of AI with grit and continuous learning.

• LinkedIn: Gilberto Titericz
• Kaggle: titericz

Bruno Oliveira

I think the most exciting feature for many is that pytest is now fully type annotated, allowing users to use mypy for type checking their testing code. This took many months of effort and was spearheaded by one of our newest core contributors, Ran Benita.

Nationality: Brazilian

Bruno is a software developer best known as a core maintainer of pytest, the widely used Python testing framework.

Within the open-source community, Oliveira (often using the handle “nicoddemus”) has been instrumental in evolving pytest’s features and ecosystem plugins over the past few years. He’s also the author of the PyTest Quick Start Guide and a frequent speaker on testing best practices. By day, Bruno leads engineering projects at ESSS (a Brazilian tech company), but he dedicates significant time to mentoring and maintaining open-source projects. His contributions have improved code quality for countless Python developers.

In Latin America, he’s a prominent voice in the Python community, known for encouraging developers to contribute to open source and for organizing local meetups and Python Brasil events.

• LinkedIn: Bruno Oliveira
• X (Twitter): nicoddemus
• GitHub: nicoddemus

Miguel Grinberg

Nationality: Argentine

Miguel is an Argentine-American software engineer and a respected author in the Python web development sphere. He is the author of the O’Reilly book Flask Web Development and the creator of the Flask Mega-Tutorial, which has been a go-to resource for Flask beginners worldwide.

Grinberg also created Flask-SocketIO, an extension that adds WebSocket support to Flask apps, enabling real-time communication. A prolific blogger, Miguel shares his deep expertise on his personal blog, covering everything from authentication to scaling Flask applications. In recent years, he has worked as a Senior Engineer at Twilio and then at Amazon Web Services, all while maintaining his educational content and open-source projects.

His impact as a community educator has made sophisticated web development concepts accessible to Spanish-speaking and global audiences alike.

• X (Twitter): miguelgrinberg
• GitHub: miguelgrinberg
• Blog: miguelgrinberg.com

Fabio Akita

Nationality: Brazilian

Fabio is a software developer and influencer who has played a pivotal role in popularizing Ruby on Rails in Latin America. Co-founder of Codeminer 42 (a major Brazilian software consultancy), Akita is also known for organizing RubyConf Brazil and running a highly successful Portuguese tech YouTube channel (“Akitando”).

He has been blogging as “AkitaOnRails” since the mid-2000s, helping a generation of developers learn Rails and modern web development. In recent years, Akita’s YouTube content (on software engineering principles, career advice, and tech history) has gained a massive following, demonstrating his knack for tech education. He continues to code and lead projects at Codeminer 42, and in 2024 he received a Ruby Community Award for his contributions to Brazil’s developer ecosystem.

Akita’s blend of hands-on engineering and community building makes him one of LatAm’s most influential tech voices.

• X (Twitter): AkitaOnRails
• Blog: akitaonrails.com

Nicolas Bevacqua

Nationality: Argentine

Nicolás is a web developer, author, and open-source evangelist best known for his blog Pony Foo and contributions to the JavaScript community.

He founded Pony Foo in 2013 as a platform for in-depth JavaScript articles, covering topics like web performance, build tooling, and progressive enhancement. Nico also authored JavaScript Application Design (published by Manning), and has been a speaker at JS conferences worldwide. He has created and contributed to numerous open-source projects and was active in communities like NodeSchool and BeerJS. In the last few years, Bevacqua worked as Head of UI Engineering at a fintech startup (Ramp), while continuing to publish technical articles.

His approachable writing and community engagement have made advanced front-end techniques more accessible to developers in Latin America and beyond.

• LinkedIn: Nicolas Bevacqua
• X (Twitter): nzgb
• GitHub: bevacqua
• Website/Blog: PonyFoo.com

Alvaro Videla

RabbitMQ Summit

Nationality: Uruguayan

Álvaro is a software engineer known for his expertise in distributed systems and messaging. He co-authored the book “RabbitMQ in Action” a definitive guide to the popular open-source message broker.

Videla was formerly a core developer of RabbitMQ and has worked on large-scale real-time systems (including time at Apple). In recent years, he moved into a Developer Advocate role at Microsoft, leveraging his deep knowledge to teach cloud messaging and event-driven architecture. Videla frequently speaks at international conferences and writes for ACM Queue and other publications. His personal journey (from selling food on the streets of Uruguay to tech leadership) has inspired many – he even shared it in a popular freeCodeCamp article.

Currently based in Europe, Videla still organizes the DuraznoConf developer conference in his hometown, giving back to the Uruguayan tech community.

• LinkedIn: Alvaro Videla
• X (Twitter): old_sound
• GitHub: oldsound
• Website/Blog: alvaro-videla.com

Felipe Hoffa

Nationality: Chilean

Felipe is a software engineer and one of the most prominent Developer Advocates in the data analytics field. He joined Google in 2011 and soon became the global Developer Advocate for Google BigQuery, where he gained fame for live-coding big data demos (like analyzing GitHub or Reddit data) to show BigQuery’s power.

After eight years at Google, Hoffa moved to Snowflake in 2020 as a Data Cloud Advocate, helping developers embrace cloud data warehouses. He is a regular speaker at data conferences and a contributor to open datasets. On social media, Hoffa is known for engaging data challenges and for highlighting Latin American tech talent. In the past 1–2 years, he has been on a “data roadshow”, working remotely around the world (including extended stays in Chile) while sharing knowledge.

His passion for data has made advanced analytics more approachable to developers globally.

• X (Twitter): felipehoffa
• Medium: Felipe Hoffa

Tania Allard

Nationality: Mexican

Tania is a Mexican-born software engineer and a leading advocate for inclusive open-source communities. With a PhD in computational modeling, Allard has combined deep technical skills with community work. She was a Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft focusing on Azure ML and MLOps, and in 2021 she became Co-Director of Quansight Labs, an open-source incubator.

Tania is a well-known PyData community member – she has organized conferences like JupyterCon and SciPy, contributed to projects like Jupyter and Matplotlib, and championed diversity through groups such as PyLadies and R-Ladies. Over the last years, she co-founded AI Inclusive (to empower underrepresented groups in AI) and was recognized as a Google Developer Expert in machine learning.

Allard frequently speaks at global events about reproducible science and inclusive design in tech. Her multifaceted contributions continue to elevate Latin America’s presence in data science and open source.

• LinkedIn: Tania Allard
• X (Twitter): ixek
• GitHub: trallard
• Website/Blog: trallard.dev

Julian Duque

Nationality: Colombian

Julián is a software developer and educator who has become a key leader in the Node.js community. A longtime Node.js contributor, he was recognized as a Node.js Collaborator Emeritus for his contributions to the project.

Duque is co-organizer of JSConf Colombia and NodeConf Colombia, helping put Latin America on the JavaScript conference map. Professionally, he worked as a Principal Developer Advocate at Heroku/Salesforce, where he helped developers around the world build and troubleshoot Node.js applications. Julián is passionate about robotics as well – he’s given fun talks on JavaScript-powered robots (NodeBots) and mentored students in that area. In the past two years, he has continued to teach through workshops and online courses (including in Spanish), and he actively encourages new contributors in Node.js evangelism.

His community-building efforts have earned him admiration throughout Latin America’s dev circles.

• X (Twitter): julian_duque
• GitHub: julianduque
• Website: julianduque.co

Gabriela de Queiroz

Nationality: Brazilian

Gabriela is a data scientist and AI engineer who has made significant strides in promoting diversity in tech. She is currently the Director of AI at Microsoft, after previously leading AI Strategy at IBM.

Gabriela is the founder of R-Ladies, a global organization that started in 2012 to support women in the R programming community, which now spans over 60+ countries. She also founded AI Inclusive, an initiative to involve more women and underrepresented groups in artificial intelligence. In her technical work, de Queiroz has contributed to open-source projects in R/Python and spoken at major conferences (including useR!, STRATA, and GHC). In 2023, she was named one of Forbes’s Top 50 Women in Tech (Brazil edition).

Gabriela continues to mentor, blog, and lead programs that lower barriers to entry in data science, embodying the idea that technical excellence and inclusion can go hand in hand.

• LinkedIn: Gabriela de Queiroz
• X (Twitter): gdequeiroz
• Website/Blog: k-roz.com

Oscar Toledo Gutierrez

Nationality: Mexican

Óscar (often known by his handle “nanochess”) is a game developer and programming prodigy famous for creating the world’s smallest chess programs and winning the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) five times.

Programming since age 5, Toledo has a talent for extreme code golf and low-level programming. He’s written a complete bootable operating system in 512 bytes and developed homebrew game development tools for vintage consoles (like IntyBASIC for Intellivision). His mini-chess programs in C and JavaScript have been widely admired as feats of algorithmic optimization. In recent years, Óscar published several books sharing the source code of his creations (e.g., Programming Games for Atari 2600 in 2022) and remains active in retro-computing forums. He also maintains a blog where he posts new demoscene-style programming challenges.

Toledo’s passion and skill demonstrate the world-class talent present in Latin America’s developer community.

• X (Twitter): nanochess
• GitHub: nanochess
• Website/Blog: nanochess.org

Luis von Ahn

Nationality: Guatemalan

Luis is a software engineer and entrepreneur best known for co-inventing CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, and for co-founding Duolingo. A Princeton Ph.D. and former Carnegie Mellon professor, von Ahn pioneered the concept of “human computation” or crowdsourcing.

In the early 2000s he helped develop CAPTCHAs (those squiggly text tests to tell humans and bots apart) and later created reCAPTCHA, which was acquired by Google in 2009. In 2011, he turned to education and launched Duolingo, the free language-learning app that is now the world’s most popular education app. Under von Ahn’s leadership as CEO, Duolingo went public in 2021 and continues to innovate with gamification and AI in education. Luis von Ahn has received many honors (he’s a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow) and is often cited as one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing for harnessing millions of users to digitize books via reCAPTCHA.

He remains actively involved in Duolingo’s development and a vocal proponent of tech empowerment in Latin America.

• LinkedIn: Luis von Ahn
• X (Twitter): LuisvonAhn

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals in LATAM 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: coding, developers, engineers, LATAM, nearshore