Senior Software Engineer

Maxwell Edwards

Senior software engineer focused on backend architecture, object-oriented design, and platform reliability. I own complex systems end-to-end, from design decisions to production outcomes, with a track record of improving latency, reliability, and developer execution speed.

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Capital OneAT&TMasters of Software Engineering

Scope I Own

Backend Architecture

Designing resilient APIs, service boundaries, and data contracts for systems that can scale without constant rewrites.

Execution Across Teams

Driving ambiguous initiatives from design to production while aligning product, engineering, and operational constraints.

Reliability at Scale

Building observability and failure isolation into the platform so teams can ship quickly without sacrificing uptime.

Technical Leadership & Impact

Led delivery of cross-functional initiatives where architecture, scope, and execution had to be shaped in parallel.

Owned system design reviews and established decision records to keep tradeoffs explicit and maintainable over time.

Mentored engineers through code reviews, decomposition strategy, and debugging workflows for high-severity incidents.

Improved API latency by ~40% on critical paths and raised release confidence through stronger test and observability guardrails.

Reduced operational overhead by automating CI/CD checks and deployment workflows, improving team throughput.

Partnered with product and design to align technical constraints with roadmap priorities and delivery risk.

Engineering Case Studies

Selected projects with emphasis on architecture, technical tradeoffs, and production-scale considerations.

View all case studies

AzureTwilioChatbotsStoried

Event-Driven Customer Engagement Chat Application

Built a resilient chatbot that improved customer engagement while handling unpredictable demand.

Impact: Reduced time-to-value by ~35% (first completed story) and improved completion rate by ~28% (draft -> publish) on customer story creation.

View architecture decisions

Architecture: Event-driven workflow using serverless functions, queue-backed task processing, and a messaging integration with Twilio.

Challenge: The system had to support unpredictable usage spikes while preserving response quality and low latency.

Design Decisions & Tradeoffs: Integrated with 3rd party APIs for direct Twilio communication and Azure Functions for scalable compute, while implementing robust retry and fallback logic to handle external service variability.

Scalability & Performance: Designed for bursty traffic with horizontal scaling and lightweight caching for high-frequency prompts.

PythonGraph VisualizationStoried

Graph-Based Relationship Visualization

Built new graph processing and rendering flow so users could visualize their data connections within their family trees.

Impact: Cut graph render latency by ~40% and improved customer engagement for complex dataset exploration.

View architecture decisions

Architecture: Hybrid pipeline: precomputed graph transformations offline and client-side progressive rendering for interactive exploration.

Challenge: Large, highly connected datasets caused UI stalls and backend query fan-out beyond 3 generations of connections.

Design Decisions & Tradeoffs: Applied graph partitioning and selective edge expansion to preserve usability without over-fetching irrelevant relationships.

Scalability & Performance: Optimized data structures and rendering techniques to maintain responsiveness as graph size increased with deeper relationship exploration.

ArchitectureDistributed SystemsCUDAUtah State University

High-Performance Clustering Engine

Engineered a benchmarked multi-backend clustering pipeline to raise throughput on high-volume datasets.

Impact: Benchmarked parallel implementations and achieved multi-fold throughput gains for million-point datasets.

View architecture decisions

Architecture: Compute-intensive clustering with multiple execution backends (CUDA, MPI, OpenMP) behind a shared evaluation harness.

Challenge: Balancing algorithm quality, execution speed, and memory pressure across different hardware targets.

Design Decisions & Tradeoffs: Standardized benchmark inputs and instrumented each backend to compare tradeoffs objectively before selecting defaults.

Scalability & Performance: Optimized memory access patterns and batching strategy to keep performance stable at higher data volumes.

Senior Engineering Capabilities

Distributed Systems & Scalability

Stateless service design, async workflows, queue-based decoupling, and horizontal scaling patterns.

Cloud Architecture & Reliability

Production-ready cloud deployments with redundancy, fault isolation, and pragmatic SLO-driven operations.

Data Modeling & Storage

Choosing relational, document, and graph models based on access patterns, consistency, and growth constraints.

Observability & Performance

Metrics, tracing, and profiling workflows used to identify latency regressions and stabilize critical paths.

Security & API Design

Authentication, authorization, schema evolution, and resilient API contracts for long-lived integrations.

Developer Productivity & CI/CD

Automated testing and delivery pipelines that reduce cycle time while preserving confidence in each release.

What People Say

Feedback focused on architecture ownership, execution reliability, and technical influence.

Max made an immediate impact, improving our DevOps pipelines, resolving security issues, and bridging gaps between teams with a calm, can-do attitude.

I've had the chance to work closely with Max, and he's one of those people who makes an immediate impact. After we walked through our CDP application together, he went from getting up to speed to contributing at a really impressive pace. He didn't just learn the platform - he put it straight into action, tightening up our DevOps pipelines and knocking out some long-standing security issues that had been tough to crack. What really stands out, though, is his ability to connect people. Max has been the steady voice between our Security and Product teams, helping us navigate competing priorities without slowing down progress. Whether he was digging into a stubborn bug or breaking down a complicated DevOps challenge into something the team could rally around, he always showed up with a calm, can-do attitude. He played a major role in our application on Azure and has been a genuinely reliable partner throughout. Max is someone I trust, enjoy working with, and would recommend without hesitation.

Phobinder Singh

Engineering Colleague

AT&TPlatform collaborationLinkedIn recommendation

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Recruiter FAQ

Quick answers to common hiring questions about scope, outcomes, and technical focus.

What roles is Maxwell Edwards open to?

Senior backend, platform, and distributed systems engineering roles, including technical leadership ownership.

What business outcomes has he delivered?

Representative outcomes include around 40% API latency improvement, around 35% faster onboarding time-to-value, and multi-fold throughput gains in data-intensive workloads.

What technologies does he work with most?

Backend architecture, distributed services, performance optimization, observability, and reliability engineering in cloud-focused production systems.

Let's Connect

Open to senior backend and platform engineering conversations, technical leadership roles, and projects that improve user's lives.

Last updated: February 14, 2026