Max R is a Senior Staff Software Engineer in New York with 14 years of experience building reliable, high-throughput systems and leading cross-functional teams at companies like Cash App, Plaid, and Lyft. He combines hands-on backend engineering in Python, Go, and TypeScript with area-level technical leadership—setting strategy, mentoring tech leads, and driving double-digit cost savings in platform work. His product work spans critical domains from dispatch and matching systems at Lyft to financial access and consent platforms at Plaid, and he now shapes commerce experiences at Cash App. An active open-source contributor, he has improved developer ergonomics and type safety in widely used projects such as python/typeshed and pyupgrade, and enhanced pre-commit tooling and test coverage for common CI hooks. He’s comfortable operating at both code and architecture levels, routinely decomposing monoliths into microservices, improving reliability and on-call practices, and influencing industry standards through RFCs and task forces. Outside typical leadership signals, he brings a consistent focus on developer experience and measurable operational improvements that scale across organizations.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Fremont High School
A tool (and pre-commit hook) to automatically upgrade syntax for newer versions of the language.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:4 reviews, 33 commits, 36 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the `pyupgrade` tool, a Python code upgrading utility. Their contributions involved rewriting code to align with newer Python syntax, specifically upgrading `six.b` calls to byte literals and handling `six.reraise` calls. Additionally, they worked on removing deprecated code, such as `six.Iterator`, and integrating multiple fixes. Further, the user enabled the `add-trailing-comma` feature, and they also updated several aliases to newer alternatives.
Contributions:9 commits, 13 PRs, 1 push in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily focused on improving the `install-local.py` script, a utility likely used for setting up the pre-commit environment locally. Their work included verifying the checksum of a virtualenv package, updating the virtualenv version, running mypy for type checking, and integrating additional pre-commit hooks. These changes suggest a focus on improving the robustness, maintainability, and functionality of the local installation process, essential for a DevOps role.
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Max R - Senior Staff Software Engineer at Cash App