Max Hirschhorn
Senior Staff Engineer, Sharding at MongoDB
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMax Hirschhorn is a Senior Staff Engineer specializing in sharding and database internals with 12 years of systems engineering experience, currently driving sharding architecture at MongoDB in New York. He combines low-level C++ changes to core distributed systems—addressing range deletions, transaction handling, and cluster metadata—with practical tooling work that improved MongoDB performance testing, including authoring a CommandTracer for reproducible JSON-based benchmarks. Caltech-educated and deeply embedded in the MongoDB codebase, he navigates both production-facing complexity and test infrastructure, reducing risk through fixes and vulnerability patches. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic, safety-first changes to large-scale storage systems and for turning intricate distributed-consensus problems into auditable, maintainable code.
13 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Science at California Institute of Technology
Github Skills (21)
json10
benchmark10
javascript10
c-language10
benchmarking10
sharding10
mongodb-database10
performance-testing10
cprogramming-language10
mongodb10
concurrency10
data-structure9
nosql9
databases9
database9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
mongodb/mongo
Aug 2014 - Jan 2023
The MongoDB Database
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer / Database Administrator
Back-end Developer & Database Engineer / Database AdministratorContributions:1 review, 899 commits, 15 PRs in 8 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily contributed to back-end database-related tasks within the MongoDB codebase. Their commits focus on modifications to the sharding implementation, addressing issues related to range deletions, transaction handling, and cluster metadata management. The user also added functionality, for example, providing a method in the ScopedTaskExecutor::Impl, and addressed a vulnerability in the same class. The contributions suggest strong skills in database internals, sharding mechanisms, and low-level system programming.
mongodb-databasec-plus-plusdatabasemongodbnosql
mongodb/mongo-perf
Jul 2018 - Sep 2018
performance tools for mongodb
Role in this project:Backend & Performance Engineer
Backend & Performance EngineerContributions:5 commits, 7 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily focused on enhancing the performance tooling for MongoDB. Their contributions included the development of a `CommandTracer` utility to generate JSON configuration files for performance tests. They modified existing scripts to support strict JSON formatting and disable implicit sessions, ensuring accurate test execution. They also worked on fixing and integrating test cases to run against earlier versions.
mongodb
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