maxbittker.com
github.com/maxbittker
maxbittker@gmail.com

Max Bittker

My work is driven by deep appreciation for both digital materials and human complexity.
I lead with curiosity about the world, and strive for clarity and excellence.

Websim.ai Founding Engineer/Designer/Engineering Manager
2024 –

First vibe-coding product on the market, empowering millions of non-coders to build skills, go viral, and form creative communities. Designed dual-sided APIs for humans and AIs. Productionized AI-SWE research, optimizing for cost, speed, and steerability.

Castle.xyz Product Designer
2022 – 2023

Product design & social algorithm for game development app & social media network. (Scratch x TikTok)

R&D Consultant
2020 – 2024

Worked with clients like New Computer, Sprout.place, ClassDojo, Artbreeder to build new tools.
My product development ethos is to use technical expertise and domain knowledge to optimize for learning by skipping forward to the hardest and most unknown parts of a product.

NYU Adjunct Professor
2020 – 2025

Taught "Hand Held", a popular 14 week project based curriculum on creative tool design and interface implementation. Alumni have gone on to work at Anthropic, Meta, Bytedance, startups.

Google User Experience Engineer
2018 – 2020

Researching and developing composable system UI for Fuchsia, a capability-based operating system.
I collaborated up and down the stack, from kernel engineers to user researchers, to bring up a new OS.

Sentry Software Engineer
2016 – 2018

Open-source tool for tracking and managing live software errors in production systems.

Selected Creative Work
Sandspiel.club

Web-based particle simulation drawing game and social network, built with Rust, Web Assembly, WebGL, and Postgres. Robust artistic community and player base, 30M+ page views, 2M+ uploaded artworks.

River

Super-smooth fast ASMR image similarity explorer for Are.na images. Powered by SigLIP and pgvector.

@NYT_first_said

Twitter bot which scrapes the New York Times and posts first-ever occurrences of words, plus their context for an audience of 200k+ followers. Covered by the NYT, Newsweek and IEEE Spectrum.

Community
Computer Engineering 2012-2016
Bachelor of Science GPA: 3.33

Queen's University