Max Chen

Full-stack Engineer

Engineering & Tech Available San Francisco, CA Website max@maxchen.dev

I ship product-worthy websites and internal tools end-to-end — from Figma to Fly.io.

Full-stack engineer and creative technologist for ambitious founders

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Featured work

Relay — an async-first team space

Lead full-stack engineer on the 0→1 build. Next.js + tRPC + Postgres with a real-time presence layer on Durable Objects.

Artisan — pitch deck generator

AI-assisted pitch deck tool. Figma → slides, powered by OpenAI function calls and a custom layout engine. Grew to 12k MAU in 6 months.

Harbor — creator analytics

Unified YouTube + TikTok + Substack dashboard for indie creators. Laravel + React + ClickHouse. Acquired by a media holding co in 2025.

Opus Coffee — brand & site

Complete brand refresh and Shopify Hydrogen storefront for a specialty roaster. Packaging, site, and print collateral.

About

Hey, I'm Max. For the past eight years I've partnered with founders, creative studios, and PMs to ship product-quality web apps fast. My sweet spot is the first 90 days of a new product: I can take a rough Figma, wire up the API, set up the infra, and hand off a working, maintainable codebase. Previously engineering at Linear, Vercel, and a couple of stealth-stage startups. I work best on small, high-trust teams where I can own scope end-to-end. Comfortable with ambiguity, aggressive deadlines, and clients who ship.

Services

MVP sprint

From $12,000

Idea to a launched, demo-ready product in 4–6 weeks.

Full-stack feature work

$140/hr

Reserved hours building features on your existing product.

0→1 product build

From $20,000

End-to-end: Figma, API, infra, and a maintainable handoff.

Technical co-founder sprint

Contact for quote

A short, intense engagement to get your product off the ground.

Architecture & code audit

From $2,000

A deep review of your codebase with a written action plan.

Performance optimization

From $1,800

Find and fix the slow paths across frontend and backend.

AI feature integration

From $6,000

Add a production-ready LLM feature, with evals.

Design-to-code

$130/hr

Pixel-accurate, accessible frontend from your Figma.

Infra & deploy setup

From $2,500

CI/CD, observability, and a one-command deploy.

Stripe & billing setup

From $1,500

Subscriptions, metering, and webhooks done right.

Monthly retainer

$8,000/mo

Reserved capacity each month for new work and fixes.

Technical advisory call

$300/call

A focused 60-minute session on your hardest problem.

Skills

TypeScript React Next.js Remix Node.js Laravel PHP Python FastAPI PostgreSQL Redis Tailwind CSS Figma Framer Motion Fly.io AWS Cloudflare Stripe Supabase Prisma TanStack Query tRPC OpenAI API Playwright Vercel