Top Underrated .NET Engineers to Follow in 2026
Curated list of engineers pushing the boundaries of backend architecture, cloud-native .NET and distributed systems. Worth following for the signal-to-noise ratio alone.
- .NET
- Backend
- Cloud
- Architecture
- Engineers
Aram Tchekrekjian
.NET Content Creator & Engineer
Built a developer education platform with 42K followers while running product engineering for a global logistics company at the same time. One of the few engineers in the MENA region producing consistent, technical .NET content at this level for nearly a decade. Now working on national digital infrastructure for Jordan after spending 15 years solving logistics problems most developers never encounter.
Dan Clarke
Software Developer & Podcast Host
The Unhandled Exception podcast has quietly become one of the most technically honest .NET resources available right now. Over 25 years of commercial software development across gaming, pharma, e-commerce and cloud infrastructure without losing depth in any of them. The .NET Oxford community he built has outlasted most developer groups because he actually shows up and runs it.
Dmitry Pavlov
Microsoft MVP (9×)
Nine Microsoft MVP awards is not a streak, it is a career-long record of contributing to the .NET community at a level most engineers never sustain. Global clients across five continents keep hiring him because the work holds up in production, not just in demos. One of the earliest practitioners to turn AI-assisted development into a repeatable engineering workflow rather than a productivity experiment.
Jamie Maguire
Microsoft MVP (AI & Developer Technologies)
Researched NLP and sentiment analysis at Masters level, then built a commercial product on top of it rather than stopping at the thesis. Holding dual Microsoft MVP status in both AI and Developer Technologies puts him in a very short list of engineers who have genuinely earned both. Teaching .NET and AI on four platforms simultaneously while still contracting at a senior level is a workload most people would not attempt.
Maksym Suprun
Tech Lead · Altium
Spent five years at Altium going deep on AWS-native .NET architecture at a time when most of the .NET community was moving in the opposite direction. Grew from software engineer to tech lead at the same company by solving harder problems, not by changing jobs. His observability work at Altium is the kind of infrastructure contribution that teams only notice when it is not there.
Nick Proud
CTO · NIAH
Started in technical support on an automation product, understood it deeper than anyone and eventually became the CTO responsible for its direction. The NIAH platform he architected is running live automation workloads for enterprise clients turning over more than one billion pounds annually. Published a book on Minimal APIs while leading an engineering team, which tells you something about how he manages his time.
Mukesh Murugan
Lead Engineer & Content Creator
Built codewithmukesh.com into a platform that has reached over 10 million developers, while still shipping production code daily as a Lead Engineer. His open-source projects have been downloaded by thousands of developers who never even knew his name when they started using them. One of the clearest voices explaining how to use AI as engineering leverage rather than a shortcut, backed by actual production experience in .NET and AWS.
Gagik Kyurkchyan
Engineering Lead
Achieved a 60x performance improvement on a critical report by making the right database and architecture decision quickly, rather than debating it slowly. Led a 50-person engineering team and cut production incident rates by 15x, not by adding process but by fixing what was actually causing the incidents. Currently building ServiceBusToolset in public, documenting every architectural tradeoff as he goes, which is the kind of transparency most engineers talk about but rarely practice.
Nick Chapsas
Co-Founder & .NET Educator · Dometrain
Co-founded Dometrain and has been producing .NET content consistently on YouTube for nearly five years without compromising the technical depth that made the audience stay. His breakdowns of performance-focused .NET topics like source generators and minimal APIs have become the kind of resource senior engineers bookmark and revisit. Runs a weekly newsletter that delivers one real, actionable .NET tip per issue, which sounds simple until you realize how hard it is to sustain that standard week after week.
Poornima Nayar
Software Engineer & Microsoft MVP · Particular Software
Currently an engineer at Particular Software, the company behind NServiceBus, which is about as close to the distributed messaging engine room of the .NET ecosystem as you can get. Serves on the .NET Foundation Outreach Committee, meaning she is not just participating in the .NET community but helping to coordinate how it grows and reaches new developers. International speaker and Microsoft MVP who has been contracting across the .NET space for over a decade while building a profile that sits at the intersection of delivery, community and distributed systems.
Poorna Soysa
Head of Digital Core · Midas Safety
Spent nearly twelve years at Midas Safety, a global industrial company and rose from integration consultant to Head of Digital Core by building the kind of software that manufacturing operations actually depend on. One of the few content creators covering .NET alongside SAP integration and RPA from real enterprise project experience rather than tutorial-level exposure. Produces .NET and AI content that comes directly from production system decisions he has had to make himself, not from what he read about them.
Mikhail Petrusheuski
Senior Software Engineer · billwerk
Holds an approved EB-1A classification, a US immigration designation reserved for individuals who can demonstrate extraordinary ability in their field. His tenure at billwerk included integrating Adyen, PayPal and Heidelpay into a FinTech platform that was subsequently acquired and his architecture work was part of that story. Has accumulated around 50 written professional recommendations across the companies he has worked with, which is the kind of social proof that does not happen by accident.
Lukas Walter
.NET AI Engineer
His posts on multi-agent routing in .NET read like engineering decisions being worked through in real time, not summaries of documentation. One of the clearer voices explaining how to deploy .NET AI workloads on Azure Container Apps without immediately reaching for Kubernetes. Approaching AI engineering in .NET from a systems perspective, which is rarer than it should be at this stage of the ecosystem.
Ben Witt
Senior Software Engineer
Carried sole technical responsibility for two mission-critical software modules at the same industrial company for nearly eight consecutive years. Twenty years of .NET development across logistics, instruments and warehouse management without drifting toward whichever framework got popular that year. Currently building plugin-based architectures and event-driven RabbitMQ integrations for warehouse management systems, the kind of backend work that never trends but always matters.
Alan Ferreira da Silva
Software Architect · Siemens
A migration architecture he designed at Siemens became the reference model for four other applications inside the same programme. Spent a decade working across Brazil, Portugal and the US on full-stack .NET systems, in three languages, for clients across three continents. Has been quietly pushing monolith-to-microservices migrations at real companies long before it became the default conference talking point.