Famous Software Engineers

Marc Lowell Andreessen (ann-DREE-sən; born July 9, 1971) is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He co-authored Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser. He co-founded Netscape. He co-founded and served as general partner for Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He founded Opsware, a software company, and later sold it to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen also co-founded Ning, a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the boards of Facebook, eBay, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and software engineer. Schmidt served as Google's CEO from 2001 to 2011. He was Executive Chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015 and Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017. In 2017, Forbes ranked Schmidt the 119th-richest person globally, with an estimated wealth of US$11.1 billion. As an intern at Bell Labs, Schmidt completely rewrote Lex, a software program that generated lexical analysers for the UNIX computer operating system. From 1997 to 2001, he was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Novell.

Anthony James Barr (born September 24, 1940), also known as Tony Barr or Jim Barr, is an American programming language designer, software engineer, and inventor. His notable contributions include the Statistical Analysis System (SAS), automated lumber yield optimization, and the Automated Classification of Medical Entities (ACME).

Linus Benedict Torvalds (Finland Swedish: [ˈliːnɵs ˈtuːrvalds] (listen); born December 28, 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer. He created the Linux kernel, the kernel for Linux operating systems and others like Android and Chrome OS. He also made the Git version control system and the Subsurface dive logging and planning software. The Technology Academy Finland honored him, along with Shinya Yamanaka, with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize.

Sean Egan is a software engineer at Google. He worked on Google Talk and currently works on Google Maps. Egan was the former project leader of Pidgin, a popular instant messaging client. He also wrote the book Open Source Messaging Application Development: Building and Extending Gaim.

Ken Jennings is an actor who appeared in his role in "Jeopardy!." Jennings received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination in 2025 for that project.

James Howard Goodnight, born January 6, 1943, is an American billionaire businessman and software developer. He has been the CEO of SAS Institute since 1976. He co-founded SAS Institute that year with faculty members from North Carolina State University.

Thomas Sterling teaches Computer Science at Indiana University. He holds a Faculty Associate position at the California Institute of Technology and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist role at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Sterling earned his PhD as a Hertz Fellow from MIT in 1984. He is known as the father of Beowulf clusters, which he developed with Don Becker. His research focuses on Petaflops computing architecture. Sterling co-authored six books and has six patents. The Gordon Bell Prize came to him in 1997. Dr. Sterling works on a computation.

Barry W. Boehm, born 1935, is an American software engineer and distinguished professor. He also teaches computer science, industrial, and systems engineering. Boehm served as the TRW Professor of Software Engineering. He founded the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at the University of Southern California. Boehm made many contributions to software engineering.

Hans Thomas Reiser, born December 19, 1963, is an American programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. In April 2008, Reiser was convicted of first-degree murder for his wife, Nina Reiser, who vanished in September 2006. He later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder under a settlement. This deal required him to reveal his wife's body location, which he stated was in a shallow grave near their home. Before prison, Reiser built the ReiserFS file system, which lives inside the Linux kernel.

Anders Hejlsberg, born December 2, 1960, is a leading Danish software engineer. He co-designed many popular, successful programming languages and tools. He wrote Turbo Pascal and designed Delphi. He now works at Microsoft as the lead architect for C# and a core developer for TypeScript.

Joshua J. Bloch, born August 28, 1961, is an American software engineer and technology author. Bloch worked at Sun Microsystems and Google. He led the design and implementation of many Java platform features. This includes the Java Collections Framework, the java.math package, and the assert mechanism. Bloch wrote the programming guide Effective Java (2001), which won the 2001 Jolt Award. He co-authored Java Puzzlers (2005) and Java Concurrency In Practice (2006). Bloch earned a B.S. in computer science from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in computer science.

Christopher Ahlberg is a Swedish-born entrepreneur and computer scientist. He runs Recorded Future as CEO and co-founder. Ahlberg also serves as an independent director for Hult International Business School. He sits on the board of Apptus AB, a Swedish software corporation. He also holds a board seat at the hedge fund Fina Technologies. Before founding Recorded Future, Ahlberg led the Spotfire Division at Tibco. He started Spotfire as an independent company in 1996. Tibco bought Spotfire for US$195 million in cash in 2007. Ahlberg founded Spotfire based on his research on information.

Larry LeRoy Constantine (pronounced Constanteen), born 1943, is an American software engineer. He teaches at the Center for Exact Sciences and Engineering at the University of Madeira Portugal. He is seen as a pioneer in computing. Constantine gave many concepts and techniques that built the basis for today's software engineering and application design and development.

Donald G. Firesmith is an American software engineer. He works as a consultant and trainer at the Software Engineering Institute.

Thomas Knoll is an American software engineer. He made Adobe Photoshop. Knoll started image processing routines in 1988. After Knoll wrote the first core routines, he showed them to his brother, John Knoll, who worked at Industrial Light and Magic. John liked the work, suggested new features, and pushed Tom to group them with a graphical user interface. In 1989, John sold the program to Adobe Systems, making it Photoshop. Knoll led development until version CS4 and now works on the Camera.

Sebastian Thrun was born May 14, 1967, and is an innovator, entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist from Germany. He is the CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, Thrun was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he started Google X and the self-driving car team. Thrun currently teaches as an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and Georgia Tech. Thrun led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Michael Howard Kay, Ph.D., FBCS, edits the W3C specification for the XSLT 2.0 language, which handles XML transformations. Kay also developed the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processing software.

Erik Gavriluk is a musician and record producer.

Frederick Phillips "Fred" Brooks Jr. (born April 19, 1931) is an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist. He managed the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package. Brooks later wrote about the process in his book, The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks earned the National Medal of Technology in 1985 and the Turing Award in 1999.

Jim Jagielski (born March 11, 1961) is an American software engineer. He specializes in web, cloud, and open source technologies.

Brad Templeton (born June 1960 near Toronto) is a Canadian software developer. He is an internet entrepreneur and an online community pioneer. Templeton publishes news, comedy, science fiction, and e-books. He is also a writer, photographer, civil rights advocate, futurist, public speaker, educator, and self-driving car consultant. Templeton graduated from the University of Waterloo.

Tathagat Verma is the son of Rajeev Verma.

Robert "Rob" C. Pike (born 1956) is a Canadian programmer and author. Pike created the Go programming language and worked at Bell Labs. There, he joined the Unix team and helped create Plan 9 from Bell Labs and the Inferno operating systems. Pike also developed the Limbo programming language and co-developed the Blit graphical terminal for Unix. Before that, he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981. Pike is the sole inventor named in AT&T's US patent 4,555,775, the "backing store patent," which is part of the X graphic system protocol and one of the first.

I am a software developer. I work on this website.

Steven "Steve Tiberius" Gibson (born March 26, 1955) is an American software engineer, security researcher, and IT security proponent. In the early 1980s, Gibson worked on light pen technology for Apple and Atari systems. In 1985, he founded Gibson Research Corporation, known for its SpinRite software.

David Neil "Dave" Cutler Sr. (born March 13, 1942) is an American software engineer, designer, and developer of several operating systems. These operating systems include Microsoft Windows NT and Digital Equipment Corporation products: RSX-11M, VAXELN, and VMS (now OpenVMS).

Grady Booch (born February 27, 1955) is an American software engineer. Booch developed the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He gained international recognition for his work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments.

Matthias Ettrich (born June 14, 1972 in Bietigheim-Bissingen, Baden-Württemberg) is a German computer scientist. He founded the KDE and LyX projects.

Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone, born March 10, 1974, is an American entrepreneur. He co-founded Twitter and other Internet services. Biz served as creative director at Xanga from 1999 to 2001. Stone co-founded Jelly with Ben Finkel. Jelly launched in 2014; it acts as a new search engine, assuming every question has an answer. Stone led Jelly as CEO until Pinterest bought it in 2017. On May 16, 2017, Biz Stone announced his return to Twitter Inc. in an unannounced role.

Madhan Karky Vairamuthu is an Indian lyricist, research associate, software engineer, and film dialogue writer. He is the son of poet and lyricist Vairamuthu. He teaches computer science as an assistant professor at the College of Engineering, Guindy.

Robert M. Love, born around 1981, is an American author, speaker, Google engineer, and open source software developer. Love made major contributions to the Linux kernel. These include the preemptive kernel, process scheduler, kernel event layer, virtual memory subsystem, and inotify. At Google, he joined the Android team and helped launch the platform's first version. Love also works in the GNOME community, developing NetworkManager, GNOME Volume Manager, Project Utopia, and Beagle.