Max Englander
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarMax Englander is an infrastructure and platform engineer with 12 years of experience, currently a software engineer at PlanetScale focused on scaling high-throughput database systems. He specializes in securing, monitoring, and operating cloud-native infrastructure—CDNs/edge, private networks, load balancers, Kubernetes, VMs, and databases—while building internal tools that speed up and harden engineering workflows. At PlanetScale he combined customer-facing incident response and performance debugging for enterprise Vitess deployments with engineering work to enable native sharding, CI/CD database branching, and zero-downtime schema migrations. An active open-source contributor, he’s improved Vitess (multi-shard transaction handling, vtbackup metrics, traffic mirroring) and extended Terraform’s Consul provider with new resources and TLS support. A former cofounder who helped scale startups through funding and acquisition, he holds a BA in Philosophy from Cornell—an unconventional background that sharpens his systems thinking.
13 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
4,021reputation
233kreached
38answers
38questions
design-patterns
top-5%
Github Skills (45)
mysql10
testing10
databases10
cloud-infrastructure10
data-base10
acceptance-testing10
terraform10
java10
javas10
terraformer10
consul10
infrastructure10
go10
h2-database10
sdk10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
vitessio/vitess
Jul 2022 - Dec 2022
Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer / Database Engineer
Back-end Developer / Database EngineerContributions:381 reviews, 27 commits, 86 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Max primarily contributes to the database clustering system Vitess, focusing on improving its functionality and robustness. Their work involves addressing issues related to temporary directory usage on macOS, which impacts the ability of MySQL clients to connect to database instances. The user also contributed to enhancing transaction handling, specifically by injecting shard names into commit-phase multi-shard error messages and improving the error handling in reserved connections. They further implemented features related to vtbackup, including the addition of metrics, and features related to query serving through the incorporation of traffic mirroring.
mysqltidbhorizontal-scalingsqlvitess
hashicorp/terraform
Sep 2015 - Aug 2016
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 6 PRs, 45 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Max implemented and modified resources and configurations related to the Consul provider within Terraform. They added the `consul_agent_service` and `consul_catalog_entry` resources, including supporting attributes like address, port, and tags. Their work involved defining schemas, creating, reading, updating, and deleting operations for these resources, as well as writing acceptance tests. The user also introduced TLS configuration support and made associated adjustments to provider configuration.
versionedconfiguration-filescloud-managementawscloud
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.