[2][3] Hintjens served as CEO and chief software designer for iMatix, a firm that produced free software applications, such as the ZeroMQ high performance message library, the OpenAMQ AMQP messaging service, Libero,[4] the GSL code generator,[5] and the Xitami web server.

[citation needed] In 2010, Hintjens was diagnosed with bile duct cancer, which was successfully surgically removed.

[11] While in his position as iMatix CEO, Hintjens founded the ZeroMQ software project together with Martin Sustrik.

ZeroMQ is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library aimed at use in scalable distributed or concurrent applications.

In October 2007, Hintjens warned that after mortgages and consumer debt, patents were a third economic bubble waiting to damage the global economy, writing: "House prices fall and bad debt shakes the financial markets across the US and Europe.