Benjamin Eckel is a software engineer at Figma and co-founder and former chief technology officer of Dylibso. He helped build Extism, Chicory, and MCP.run, applying WebAssembly and distributed-systems engineering to a fundamental challenge: safely incorporating external code, extensibility, and AI agents into production software.
Eckel previously led developer experience at Recurly and worked on integrations and edge observability at Datadog, where adapting monitoring tools to Cloudflare Workers and Fastly renewed his interest in WebAssembly. He subsequently founded Dylibso with Steve Manuel and Zach Shipko, colleagues he had met at Recurly.
At Dylibso, Extism supplied a common framework for embedding WebAssembly plug-ins across programming languages. Chicory brought WebAssembly execution into the Java Virtual Machine without native dependencies, keeping deployment, safety, and observability within familiar Java constraints. MCP.run extended this approach into AI infrastructure through managed Model Context Protocol server profiles and executable tasks.
- Sandboxing model-generated code: Eckel argues that AI-generated programs must be treated as untrusted because they can malfunction, behave maliciously, or encounter prompt injection. His WebAssembly sandboxing approach limits what generated code can access and execute.
- Turning existing APIs into plug-in systems: His extension-architecture model repurposes webhooks as events, HTTP APIs as controlled capabilities, and OpenAPI schemas as typed interfaces for WebAssembly plug-ins.
- XTP Bindgen: Eckel introduced schema-generated plug-in bindings, enabling developers to write typed extensions in familiar languages while application owners retain explicit interface contracts.
- Observability across isolation boundaries: His analysis of WebAssembly telemetry explains why conventional monitoring assumptions fail inside constrained runtimes. For AI agents, he applies OpenTelemetry trace propagation to connect MCP clients and servers under shared administrative control; independently operated services remain necessarily opaque. At AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025, he demonstrated passing trace context through MCP metadata and advocated shared semantic conventions for identifying agent operations and tool calls.
Eckel also founded Below C Level, a New Orleans systems-programming community focused on understanding how software and computing systems work.
