This thesis presents a measurement of the inclusive electron production cross-section from heavy-flavour decays with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. A dataset of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV with a total integrated luminosity of 1.28 ± 0.04 1/pb is used for this measurement. Signal electrons, arising predominantly from semi-leptonic decays of charm and bottom hadrons, are extracted using a binned maximum likelihood method. The integrated cross-section for electrons originating from heavy- flavour decays, in the transverse momentum range 7 < pT < 26 GeV and within the pseudorapidity range |η| < 2, excluding 1.37 < |η| < 1.52, is σ_e = 0.946 ± 0.020(stat.) ± 0.146(syst.) ± 0.032(lumi.) μb. A study of the production rate of bottom hadrons, based on the same dataset as the inclusive measurement, is also presented. The relative pT of the electron with respect to a nearby track-jet is used in a binned maximum likelihood fit to differentiate the bottom hadron signal from charm, light hadron and photon conversion backgrounds.