Max Countryman is a seasoned engineering leader with 15 years of experience building platform, data, and infrastructure teams that drive measurable business outcomes. Currently Senior Director of Engineering at Ripple and formerly leading Platform Engineering at Lob and Curology, he blends strategic leadership with hands-on systems work to reduce costs, increase velocity, and secure data/privacy outcomes. He has founded startups and co-founded ventures, bringing operator experience to hiring, vendor negotiations, and cross-functional product partnerships. An active open-source contributor, Max has improved core libraries like requests and flask-login and extended a Rust SQL parser with LISTAGG and ILIKE support, reflecting deep backend and data-language expertise. Based in San Francisco, he pairs a people-first leadership style with a background in cultural anthropology, which informs his emphasis on psychological safety and inclusive hiring. Colleagues rely on him to translate complex technical problems into practical, auditable systems that scale.
15 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology at University of Miyazaki
B.A. Cultural Anthropology, B.A. Cultural Anthropology at The Evergreen State College
Anthropology Japanese, Anthropology Japanese at Eastern Washington University
Contributions:299 commits, 3 PRs, 5 pushes in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Max's contributions primarily centered around the implementation of OAuth-related components. They added a service module and associated tests, indicating a focus on back-end logic for handling OAuth 1.0/a services. Code changes also included updates to the project's licensing and the removal of a workaround related to a specific requests bug.
Contributions:2 reviews, 147 commits, 76 PRs in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily contributed to the `flask-login` library, a Flask extension for user session management. Their commits demonstrate a focus on maintaining and improving the library's core functionality, including bug fixes, version updates, and adding new features. The changes involve modifications to the Python code of the library as well as updates to setup.py and documentation files.
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Max Countryman - Senior Director Of Engineering at Ripple