Max Englander
Software Engineer at PlanetScale
Ferndale, Michigan, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMax Englander is a Lead Software Engineer specializing in large-scale database orchestration and cloud-native infrastructure, currently driving Vitess at PlanetScale to support multi-shard, multi-million-query-per-second workloads. With 13 years of experience across startups and enterprises, he builds and operates resilient systems—Kubernetes operators, CDNs, private networks, load balancers, and DB clusters—while automating reliability and reducing toil for engineering teams. He has a strong track record in production database engineering and tooling, contributing to open-source projects like Vitess and Terraform and extending databases such as H2 with new data types. Max pairs hands-on systems work with customer-facing roles, migrating enterprise workloads with zero downtime and tuning platforms for extreme scale. Based in Ferndale, Michigan, he combines philosophical training from Cornell with a founder’s mindset from launching and scaling startups, which fuels pragmatic, long-term infrastructure design.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts Philosphy, Bachelor of Arts Philosphy at Cornell University
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
4,021reputation
233kreached
38answers
38questions
design-patterns
top-5%
Github Skills (42)
mysql10
testing10
databases10
cloud-infrastructure10
acceptance-testing10
terraform10
java10
javas10
terraformer10
consul10
infrastructure10
go10
api10
sdk10
h2-database10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
vitessio/vitess
Jul 2022 - Dec 2022
Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:381 reviews, 27 commits, 86 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily contributes to the database clustering system Vitess, focusing on improving its functionality and robustness. Their work involves addressing issues related to temporary directory usage on macOS, which impacts the ability of MySQL clients to connect to database instances. The user also contributed to enhancing transaction handling, specifically by injecting shard names into commit-phase multi-shard error messages and improving the error handling in reserved connections. They further implemented features related to vtbackup, including the addition of metrics, and features related to query serving through the incorporation of traffic mirroring.
mysqltidbhorizontal-scalingsqlvitess
hashicorp/terraform
Sep 2015 - Aug 2016
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 6 PRs, 45 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Max implemented and modified resources and configurations related to the Consul provider within Terraform. They added the `consul_agent_service` and `consul_catalog_entry` resources, including supporting attributes like address, port, and tags. Their work involved defining schemas, creating, reading, updating, and deleting operations for these resources, as well as writing acceptance tests. The user also introduced TLS configuration support and made associated adjustments to provider configuration.
versionedconfiguration-filescloud-managementawscloud
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