About

Max Wolffe is a seasoned backend engineer with over a decade of experience in designing and building performant distributed systems. He is currently working as a Sr. Software Engineer at Databricks, where he continues to hone his skills in system design and development. Max's expertise lies in several domains, including distributed system design, offline/nearline processing, API design, and operations. He has worked on two large service-oriented architecture business modules (Messaging and Groups) at LinkedIn, where he designed components that scaled to thousands of requests per second across several data centers. His experience in offline processing includes writing nearline jobs in Samza and using Pig and Hive scripts. Max has also written many endpoints at LinkedIn and serves on the Data Model Review Committee, where he advises other engineers on good API design. Max is passionate about getting things into production and ensuring that they work correctly. He has written processes at LinkedIn to help other engineers operationalize their systems and cares deeply about monitoring, instrumenting, and alerting for production systems. His core system design philosophy is to start with a simple working system and build on it, as opposed to designing complex systems from scratch. Max holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with Honors from the University of California, Berkeley. He spends a fair amount of his time reading and is an avid fan of the Pacific Northwest. Max is a devoted husband and is always looking to learn and grow both personally and professionally.