Maxime Beauchemin

Maxime Beauchemin is a Quebec City-raised data engineer who created two of the most widely used open-source projects in the modern data stack: Apache Airflow and Apache Superset. He built his early career as a data engineer, working through roles at companies including Ubisoft, Yahoo and Facebook before landing at Airbnb, where his most influential work took shape.

At Airbnb, Beauchemin built Airflow in 2014 to orchestrate the company's increasingly complex data pipelines, designing workflows as code using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Airflow's Python-native, extensible approach struck a chord with data engineers everywhere and it was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, eventually becoming the de facto standard for scheduling and orchestrating data pipelines across the industry.

Not content with one major open-source project, Beauchemin went on to create Superset (originally Panoramix) in 2015-2016, a data exploration and visualisation platform designed to give analysts fast, SQL-based dashboards over large datasets. Superset, too, was donated to the Apache Software Foundation and grew into one of the leading open-source business intelligence tools, used by thousands of organisations as an alternative to proprietary BI software.

In 2021, Beauchemin founded Preset, a company offering a managed cloud version of Superset, turning his open-source project into a commercial platform while continuing to lead its community development as CEO. He has written and spoken widely on data engineering practice, coining concepts like "project community fit" to describe how open-source projects find sustainable adoption.

Beauchemin's rare feat of creating two separate, category-defining open-source projects — one for orchestration, one for visualisation — has left an outsized mark on how modern data teams build and monitor pipelines and dashboards. Both Airflow and Superset remain foundational, widely deployed infrastructure across the data industry today.