Top 23 DevOps Influencers to Follow in 2026

Jyoti Bansal is co-founder and CEO of Harness, a software delivery company, and a technology entrepreneur who previously founded and led the application performance monitoring company AppDynamics.

At Harness, Bansal has focused on making it easier to move code into production while keeping the process secure and controlled. He also studies how AI-generated code affects software delivery: when teams write code faster, they need stronger reviews, testing, security checks, and deployment processes.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the creator of Jenkins and a software and company builder. His work on continuous integration helped make automated build and delivery workflows widely accessible.

Kawaguchi created Jenkins, which became a widely used tool for automating software builds, tests, and releases. His work helped make these automated steps a standard part of DevOps.

Steve McGhee is a Site Reliability Engineer at Google with a background on distributed systems, production reliability, networking, security, and operating large-scale infrastructure.

McGhee focuses on helping teams make software more reliable before problems happen. Through his writing, talks, and training, he explains how to build reliability programs, understand complex systems, and improve the way teams run their services.

Bryan Cantrill is co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, a systems software engineer and longtime infrastructure builder. His earlier work includes Sun Microsystems and Joyent Systems.

At Oxide, Cantrill helps design computing systems that combine hardware, software, networking, and cloud tools for organizations to run on site. He also writes and speaks about debugging, engineering culture, open systems, and the decisions that make infrastructure reliable.

Werner Vogels is VP and CTO of Amazon, where he drives the company's technology vision. He's a former Cornell distributed-systems researcher with a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Vogels has helped explain how Amazon builds cloud systems that can serve many users reliably. He writes about system design and technology strategy, helping engineering leaders understand what changes when software operates around the world at a large scale.

Abby Bangser is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso who works on Kratix and internal developer platforms, drawing on experience across platform, site reliability, quality engineering, and delivery.

Bangser treats internal platforms as products that help developers do their work. Through her work on Kratix, platform APIs, Team Topologies, and reliability, she shows how teams can build self-service tools that make development easier while meeting technical and organizational needs.

Angie Jones is VP of Developer Experience at the Agentic AI Foundation, an engineering executive and educator whose work include AI engineering, developer tooling, testing, and automation.

Jones helps developers use AI agents through shared standards, working examples, and tools that work together. Her experience in test automation, developer education, and engineering leadership helps her build tools teams can use safely and effectively.

Casey Rosenthal is a software reliability leader and author known for defining Chaos Engineering, after leading Netflix's Chaos Engineering team and co-founding verification company Verica.

Rosenthal helped develop chaos engineering, which tests live systems to find weaknesses before they cause failures. His work helps teams learn how complex software behaves and make it more reliable.

Mitchell Hashimoto is co-founder of Superlogical and the co-founder of HashiCorp, where he helped create infrastructure tools including Vagrant and Terraform before stepping away in 2023.

Hashimoto’s tools help developers set up consistent work environments and manage infrastructure with code. More recently, he has built developer tools such as Ghostty and worked with Superlogical on new ways to organize technical work.

Patrick Kua is the founder of Tech Lead Academy, a technology leadership educator and former N26 CTO and Chief Scientist. His career also includes technical leadership at ThoughtWorks.

Kua helps engineers become stronger leaders. He teaches communication, big-picture thinking, team design, feedback, and how to guide change. His work shows how good leadership and teamwork help organizations make lasting improvements to their engineering practices.

Andrew Fong is Vice President of Engineering at Databricks and the former co-founder and CEO of Prodvana. His career focuses on infrastructure, reliability, developer experience, and delivery.

Fong built Prodvana around automating cloud-native delivery and reducing production complexity before the company joined Databricks. His work spans CI/CD, deployment safety, infrastructure, SRE, and developer experience, with a continuing focus on making production systems easier for engineers and automation to operate.