Vietnam’s Tech Stars: Top 13 Software Developers

Vietnam’s tech talent is leaving its mark on the global stage.

From architects of billion-dollar startups to open-source pioneers and programming prodigies, Vietnamese devs at home and abroad are pushing innovation forward. Here is the updated list of the best VN software developers, based on open-source contributions, startup leadership, influential tech content creation, impactful roles at major tech companies and achievements in international coding contests:

1. Loi Luu
2. Thuan Pham
3. Cuong Do
4. Phan An
5. Hung Bui
6. Julia Nguyen
7. Pham Huy Hoang
8. Christine Yen
9. Nguyen Van Quang Huy
10. Hung Tran
11. Minh “Gooseman” Le
12. Thanh Le
13. Nam Do

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

Loi Luu

Crypto Valley Conference: Day 2.

Loi is a blockchain engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Kyber Network in 2017.

KN is a prominent decentralized finance (DeFi) platform – a liquidity hub facilitating instant cryptocurrency swaps. A PhD holder in computer science, Loi gained recognition for his research in blockchain security and was named one of Asia’s top 10 Innovators Under 35 by MIT Tech Review. As Kyber’s CEO, he led the development of the protocol (open-sourcing its smart contracts on Ethereum) and raised ~$50M through an ICO, one of the first by a Vietnamese team. Kyber now processes over $100M in daily decentralized trades. Loi remains actively involved in coding and reviewing Kyber’s codebase, ensuring security after major updates.

He’s also an advocate for Vietnam’s crypto developer community, frequently speaking about blockchain programming and mentoring new Web3 startups. His success with Kyber has positioned him as a thought leader in Asia’s blockchain scene.

• LinkedIn: Loi Luu
• X (Twitter): @loi_luu
• Website/Blog: loiluu.com

Thuan Pham

Thuan is best known as the Chief Technology Officer of Uber from 2013 to 2020, where he oversaw the hyper-growth of Uber’s engineering team and platform.

A Vietnamese-American who arrived in the U.S. as a refugee, Thuận studied computer science at MIT and had stints at Silicon Valley companies like VMware before joining Uber. Under his technical leadership, Uber scaled to serve billions of rides, and Thuận became one of the longest-serving CTOs in Uber’s history. He was instrumental in rebuilding Uber’s infrastructure to handle global demand. Thuận’s story has been widely covered as an inspiration for the Vietnamese tech community – showing how a Vietnam-born coder rose to the C-suite of a Silicon Valley giant.

Even as an executive, he remained closely involved in engineering decisions and mentorship. After Uber, he has continued to advise startups and invest in Vietnam’s tech ecosystem.

• LinkedIn: Thuan Pham

Cuong Do

Cuong was a founding engineering team member at YouTube, joining as the third engineer in 2005. He helped scale YT’s infrastructure from a scrappy startup to the world’s largest video platform, tackling massive scalability challenges.

After Google’s acquisition of YouTube, Cuong went on to senior engineering roles – he became Head of Dropbox’s New York Engineering office and later VP of Engineering at fintech startup Cockroach Labs. Now a co-founder of a new AI startup (Mindy), Cuong has a track record as both an early employee driving startup hyper-growth and a hands-on tech leader. Throughout his career, he remained an active coder, famously sharing his experiences optimizing YouTube in tech talks and blogs.

His journey from Vietnam to Silicon Valley and contributions at YouTube have made him a role model for Vietnamese engineers worldwide.

• LinkedIn: Cuong Do
• X (Twitter): @chiefdoofficer

Phan An

Phan is a Vietnam-born software developer who is a core contributor to Vue.js, one of the world’s most popular JavaScript frameworks.

As an early member of the Vue core team, Phan An has made significant contributions to Vue’s ecosystem – including working on the official Vue documentation website and creating libraries like vue-query. He also evangelized Vue in its early days, helping it gain adoption. Phan An currently works in Germany as an Engineering Team Lead at InterNations, but continues to collaborate with Vue’s global open-source community. His presence on the Vue core team showcases Vietnamese talent in the open-source arena at an international level.

In addition, he has built various open-source tools and writes about front-end development, bridging best practices between Asian and European developer communities. Phan An’s work exemplifies open-source contribution – his code is used by countless developers through Vue.js, and he remains committed to refining developer tools that make web development more enjoyable.

• LinkedIn: Phan An
• X (Twitter): @phanan
• Website/Blog: phanan.net

Hung Bui

Dr. Bui Hai Hung is a leading figure in AI, recognized as the founding director of VinAI Research – Vingroup’s AI lab which quickly ranked among the world’s top 25 industrial AI labs.

After earning his PhD in the US, Hung spent over 15 years in Silicon Valley, including as a research scientist at Stanford Research Institute and Google DeepMind. He returned to Vietnam in 2018 to spearhead VinAI, assembling a team that has published in top conferences (NeurIPS, ICML) and open-sourced multiple AI tools. Hung has contributed to fundamental AI research (with 8000+ citations) in probabilistic inference and deep learning. As an executive, he remains hands-on: coding research prototypes and reviewing technical work.

He has also fostered a new generation of Vietnamese AI engineers through internships and collaboration with universities.

• LinkedIn: Hung Bui

Julia Nguyen

Julia is a Vietnamese-Canadian developer known for blending coding with community activism.

She is the founder of ‘if-me’, an open-source mental health app and online community that encourages users to share experiences with loved ones. Launched in 2015, if-me has contributors worldwide and has been highlighted for its inclusive, beginner-friendly open-source culture. Julia has worked as a software engineer at IndieGoGo, Mailchimp, and other tech companies, where she advocates for diversity and mental health awareness in tech. She frequently speaks at tech conferences (like LeadDev and CodeNewbie) about building empathetic software and inclusive open-source communities.

Julia’s influence extends through her writing and talks, which inspire developers to consider social impact. For her work, she’s been featured in media like HuffPost and was named to Canada’s Top 30 Under 30 in Tech. As both a coder and a community builder, Julia Nguyễn exemplifies how software development can drive positive change beyond just code.

• LinkedIn: Julia Nguyen
• X (Twitter): @JuliaNguyen
• Website/Blog: julianguyen.org

Pham Huy Hoang

Pham is one of Vietnam’s most popular software engineering content creators.

By day, he’s a full-stack developer; by night, he’s better known as the author of the blog “Tôi Đi Code Dạo” (“I Wander Coding”) and a YouTube channel with over 700K views. Huy Hoàng’s Vietnamese-language tutorials and career advice have made him a household name among young coders. He has published best-selling programming books in Vietnamese, including “From Coder to Developer”, and he often speaks at local tech events. As a developer, he has contributed to open-source projects on GitHub and worked at companies in Singapore and Vietnam, which gives him real-world experience to share. His influence in the dev community (45K+ Facebook followers on his page) has helped countless students learn coding, security basics, and web development.

Pham Huy Hoang exemplifies the modern developer who not only writes code but also educates and inspires others, bridging the gap between Vietnam’s tech industry and its next generation of engineers.

• LinkedIn: Pham Huy
• GitHub: conanak99
• Website/Blog: toidicodedao.com

Christine Yen

Christine is a Vietnamese-American software engineer turned CEO, co-founder of Honeycomb.io, a cutting-edge observability platform for devops teams.

As a developer-turned-entrepreneur, Christine built a career on understanding developers’ needs. Before Honeycomb, she was an engineer at Parse and remained with Facebook after Parse’s acquisition, where she built analytics products to help app developers glean insights. In 2016, she co-founded Honeycomb to bring “observability” tooling to the masses, and today it’s used by engineering teams globally to debug and optimize complex systems. Christine remains hands-on technically – she often prototypes new product features and has spoken at conferences like OSCON and KubeCon about debugging and performance. She is also an influential voice in tech, advocating for more inclusive and human-centered engineering cultures (especially for women in tech). Under her leadership, Honeycomb won the 2022 Technology of the Year Award (InfoWorld).

Christine Yen’s journey from writing code to leading a developer-tool startup exemplifies the full-stack excellence of Vietnamese developers in the international tech arena.

• LinkedIn: Christine Yen
• X (Twitter): @cyen

Nguyen Van Quang Huy

Nguyen is the co-founder and CTO of Holistics, a Saas business intelligence platform that provides data analytics tools to companies.

Huy co-founded Holistics in 2015 after encountering data bottlenecks in a prior job. As a software engineer-turned-entrepreneur, he architected the Holistics BI system which merges software engineering principles with analytics – enabling data teams to define datasets as code. Under his technical leadership, Holistics grew from a Vietnam-based startup to serving clients globally, and Huy was named in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2018 for Enterprise Technology. Beyond the product, Huy is influential through content: he co-founded the “Grokking Vietnam” developer community and often blogs about startup engineering challenges on his site.

He remains a hands-on coder, contributing to the Holistics codebase (which includes open-source elements) and ensuring the platform’s scalability. Huy’s success demonstrates how Vietnam’s developers are creating world-class B2B software from scratch.

• LinkedIn: Huy Nguyen
• X (Twitter): @iamhuy
• Website/Blog: nvquanghuy.com

Hung Tran

Hung is the founder of Got It!, an on-demand tutoring app that reached #2 on the U.S. App Store education charts.

Hùng earned his PhD in computer science in the U.S. before starting Got It in Silicon Valley in 2014. The app connects students with expert tutors in minutes, and has raised millions in venture funding. As CEO, Hùng built a distributed team including many Vietnamese engineers, and he remained actively involved in the product’s development (he was originally the CTO). Got It’s success – with millions of problems solved and partnerships with education publishers – made Hùng one of the rare Vietnamese startup founders in Silicon Valley. He has since been active in Vietnam’s tech scene, launching a non-profit to teach coding to youth.

Hùng’s story, from provincial Vietnam to the US and back, showcases how Vietnamese developers can compete globally. He continues to code prototypes and new features even as he oversees strategy at Got It.

• LinkedIn: Hung Tran

Minh Le

Minh Lê (nicknamed “Gooseman”) is a Vietnamese-Canadian programmer famed for co-creating Counter-Strike, one of the most influential video games of all time.

In 1999, while still a student, Minh developed the CS mod for Half-Life together with Jess Cliffe. This team-based shooter quickly became a global esports phenomenon and was later acquired by Valve, evolving into a franchise with tens of millions of players. Minh wrote much of the game’s code (weapon physics, networking) and designed maps, essentially defining the tactical FPS genre. After Counter-Strike’s success, he continued to write games, including Tactical Intervention and later joined Pearl Abyss to work on new titles. Minh’s story is legendary among developers: a hobbyist modder whose creation is still played professionally 20+ years later.

He remains active in the game dev scene, often engaging with the modding community. His achievement demonstrates the global impact a Vietnamese-origin developer can have – CS is a staple of gaming history, and Gooseman’s coding prowess is a big reason why.

• LinkedIn: Minh Le
• X (Twitter): @GoosemanCS

Thanh Le

I feel proud when choosing to return to Vietnam to start a business with my passion.

Lê Yên Thanh is a decorated Vietnamese programmer who turned down a job offer from Google to launch his own startup in Vietnam.

As a student, Thanh won over 100 IT awards, including national coding contests, and was nicknamed the “Informatics Golden Boy”. He developed BusMap, a public transit app for Ho Chi Minh City, which gained 2 million+ downloads and helped modernize city transit. BusMap’s success led Thanh to found a company (now Phenikaa MaaS) providing smart mobility solutions. At just 25, he also pursued a PhD in computer science. Thanh has shown leadership while staying technical – he personally coded large parts of BusMap and later oversaw its open data integration. In 2020, BusMap was acquired by Phenikaa Group, and Thanh now leads R&D at Phenikaa MaaS, expanding transit tech to other cities.

His journey from winning a Google internship to choosing Vietnam’s startup scene has made him an icon for young devs aspiring to “build big things at home”.

• LinkedIn: Thanh Le

Nam Do

Nam is a veteran Vietnamese-Australian software developer and entrepreneur best known for co-founding Emotiv Systems, a pioneering brain-computer interface (BCI) company.

In 2003, Nam helped start Emotiv and led the development of the Emotiv EPOC headset – a groundbreaking device that reads EEG brainwaves to control computers. As CEO/CTO in Emotiv’s early years, he guided both the hardware and the signal-processing software, showcasing full-stack technical chops. Emotiv’s technology garnered international acclaim for its innovation in neurogaming and was featured at TED. Prior to Emotiv, Nam founded SASme (a mobile messaging platform) in 1999, which delivered SMS applications for carriers. With each venture, Nam remained in the code – from low-level algorithm development to user-facing app design.

After Emotiv, he has continued to launch startups and most recently has been building platforms for co-working and the metaverse. Nam Đỗ’s career, marked by bold technological firsts, has made him a trailblazer among Vietnamese developers on the global stage.

• LinkedIn: Nam Do

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals in Vietnam 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, digital, engineers, experts