Robert Pirtle
Staff Software Engineer at Kava Labs Inc
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRobert Pirtle is a Staff Software Engineer based in Portland, Oregon with a decade of experience building secure, pragmatic full-stack systems and back-end architectures. He currently drives engineering at Kava Labs, contributing to DeFi infrastructure while previously architecting end-to-end encrypted APIs, SDKs, and cryptographic features at Tozny. Comfortable across Golang, TypeScript, Python, and Java, he blends API design, systems thinking, and product collaboration to ship maintainable services at scale. Robert is an active open-source contributor who has improved UX in hexo-admin and refactored protobuf-driven DeFi modules, a mix that highlights his fluency in both front-end polish and protocol-level backend work. His background in physics and early hands-on roles—from modeling building energy systems to maintaining a century-old yacht—inform a practical, detail-oriented approach to engineering and problem solving.
10 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Study abroad program, Study abroad program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de ValparaísoBachelor’s Degree Physics, Bachelor’s Degree Physics at Lewis & Clark College
English, Spanish
Github Skills (14)
css10
cosmos-sdk10
javascript10
go10
f10
front-end-development10
codemirror10
protobuffer10
blockchain10
react10
protobuf10
grpc9
markdown-it9
markdown9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
Kava-Labs/kava
Oct 2022 - Jan 2023
DeFi for Crypto.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 releases, 239 reviews, 45 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Robert primarily focused on refactoring and modifying protobuf definitions within the Kava DeFi repository, removing YAML tags and addressing formatting errors to improve code maintainability and consistency. They added new total supply queries for multiple modules including earn, savings, and liquid, enhancing the project's data retrieval capabilities. Additionally, the user introduced x/community module related lend proposals, integrating them into the codebase. Finally, the user removed x/mint references, migrating the minting functionality to the existing x/kavamint module.
cryptoblockchaingocryptocurrencycosmos-sdk
jaredly/hexo-admin
Dec 2016 - Apr 2018
An Admin Interface for Hexo
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:19 commits, 17 PRs, 10 pushes in 1 year 4 months
Contributions summary:Robert primarily focused on enhancing the front-end interface of the Hexo admin panel. Their contributions included upgrading the CodeMirror component, implementing settings pages with checkboxes and text inputs, and improving the editor's functionality by adding features like file renaming, grammar checking, and image pasting capabilities. They also addressed CSS issues and layout problems to improve the user experience.
admin-interfacehexo
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