Hi, I’m Max

I’m currently a software engineer at Databricks, working on the Operating Systems Infrastructure Team. I previously worked at LinkedIn on the Realtime Messaging Platform.

I’m primarily interested in building performant distributed systems. My number one priority is to keep learning.

I spend a fair amount of my time reading - https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/33541735-max-wolffe

Some of the domains I have experience in:

• Distributed system design - I’ve worked on two large service-oriented architecture business modules (Messaging and Groups at LinkedIn) as well as a large infrastructure system (Realtime at LinkedIn). For both problem spaces, I’ve designed components which scaled to thousands of requests per second across several data centers.
• Offline / Nearline processing - I’ve written nearline jobs in Samza and have a few Pig and Hive scripts under my belt. Not an expert in the offline space, but familiar enough to get around.
• API design - I’ve written many endpoints at LinkedIn and serve on the Data Model Review Committee, which is responsible for advising other engineers around good API design.
• Operations - I love getting things into production and making sure they work in production. I’ve written processes at LinkedIn to help other engineers operationalize their systems and care deeply about monitoring, instrumenting, and alerting for production systems.

My core system design philosophy is the quotation from John Gall: """ A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. """

I build simple, working systems.

You can send me an email here

Thanks for visiting!