Robert 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 Valparaíso
Bachelor’s Degree Physics, Bachelor’s Degree Physics at Lewis & Clark College
Contributions: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.
Contributions: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.
hexoadminadmin-interface
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.
Request Free Trial
Robert Pirtle - Staff Software Engineer at Kava Labs Inc