Maxwell Dylla
Founding Member Of Technical Staff at Cognition Consulting
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMaxwell Dylla is a technical founder and engineering leader with eight years of experience building production software that accelerates materials R&D and physical product development. He blends a PhD in Materials Science with hands-on backend engineering—contributing to notable open-source projects like pymatgen and the Fireworks workflow manager—where he implemented core molecular-orbital features and robust authentication for database-backed workflows. As a founding member of technical staff at Cosmon and former CTO and co-founder of BlueprintX, he has led teams from startup proof-of-concept to production, growing engineering groups and shipping agentic software for homeowners and pilot manufacturing systems. Maxwell excels at bridging domain science and software, turning applied research into scalable tools for R&D and manufacturing. Based in Oakland, he’s driven by collaborative problem-solving and a focus on sustainable, real-world impact. A perhaps unexpected strength is his track record of writing thorough tests and error handling in scientific code, reflecting an engineer’s discipline for reliability in research-grade software.
8 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Materials Science and Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern UniversityBachelor of Science (BS) Materials Science, Bachelor of Science (BS) Materials Science at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
Github Skills (14)
authentication10
user-authentication10
pymatgen10
science10
mongodb10
python10
fireworks10
mongodb-database10
materials-informatics10
pymongo10
testing10
unit-test9
database-administration9
unit-testing9
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
materialsproject/pymatgen
Oct 2017 - Mar 2019
Python Materials Genomics (pymatgen) is a robust materials analysis code that defines classes for structures and molecules with support for many electronic structure codes. It powers the Materials Project.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 2 PRs, 1 comment in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Maxwell implemented and improved the `MolecularOrbitals` class, which appears to be a core component for materials analysis within the pymatgen library. Their contributions involved adding new functionality, addressing bug fixes, and enhancing the class's robustness by incorporating error handling. Additionally, the user added tests to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the `MolecularOrbitals` functionality, including tests for edge cases such as fractional compositions. These changes directly contribute to the library's capabilities for characterizing materials.
moleculespythonscienceelectronic-structurepowers
materialsproject/fireworks
Feb 2019 - Feb 2019
The Fireworks Workflow Management Repo.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Maxwell primarily focused on implementing and testing authentication features within the `fireworks` project, modifying the launchpad component. They added functionality to handle authentication parameters in the MongoClient constructor, which involved database access configuration. Furthermore, the user created and modified tests to verify authentication against the correct MongoDB databases, including tests for user privileges.
repo-managementfireworksworkflow-managementworkflow
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