Max Schaefer
AI Engineer at XBOW
Oxford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMax Schaefer is an AI Engineer with 13 years of software engineering and research experience, currently driving AI work at XBOW after a five-year tenure as Principal Software Engineer at GitHub. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Oxford and has a strong research-to-production track record spanning academia (postdocs and an assistant professorship) and industry. Max is a pragmatic full-stack developer and code-quality advocate who has contributed bug fixes, parser improvements, and test automation to well-known open-source projects including Cloud9, Acorn, JSHint and CodeMirror. He combines deep language- and tooling-level expertise with engineering leadership—having led and managed teams at Semmle before GitHub—and often focuses on subtle correctness issues in parsers and linters that improve developer tooling reliability.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science at University of Oxford
Github Skills (15)
code-analysis10
javascript10
refactoring10
text-parsing10
parsing10
codemirror10
refactor10
test-automation10
testing10
emacs9
vim9
uid8
front-end-development8
ui-design8
erlang6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
acornjs/acorn
Dec 2015 - Nov 2017
A small, fast, JavaScript-based JavaScript parser
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 15 PRs, 20 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily contributed to bug fixes and code improvements within the acornjs/acorn repository, a JavaScript parser. Their work involved addressing parsing errors, particularly related to strict mode, octal literals, and ES2016/ES2017 features. The user also improved the parsing logic for array patterns and object properties, and fixed issues related to reserved words in import specifiers.
javascriptparser
codemirror/codemirror5
Jul 2015 - May 2017
In-browser code editor (version 5, legacy)
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:9 commits, 5 PRs, 3 comments in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily contributed to the quality assurance of the code editor by writing and modifying tests. Their work involved writing and fixing tests related to the emacs and vim keymaps, as well as the erlang mode, which validated the behavior of the code editor's features. The commits show focus on ensuring the correct functionality of various features through the use of automated testing, and the modification of existing tests.
code-editor
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.