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m.Max Heller Tran
INDEPENDENT ENGINEER & FOUNDER PRODUCT · ENGINEERING · INDEPENDENCE

Max Heller TranI turn complexity
into working software.

Previously Amazon / AWS.
Now building SaledaAI — software for
the work behind legal cases.

Explore the workGet in touch
PRODUCT THINKING. SYSTEMS ENGINEERING. HUMAN JUDGMENT.SCROLL TO EXPLORE ↓

01 / SELECTED WORK

An idea is a start.
The details make it real.

A company I’m building.
The way I work to build it.

01.1 / SALEDAAIFOUNDER · PRODUCT · ENGINEERING

Less between
people and progress.

I’m building SaledaAI to connect the work behind legal cases: conversations, workflows, integrations, and human review.

Explore SaledaAI
01 / CONVERSATION
Start with a person.Calls & communications
saleda / connected workspace
02 / KEEP THE CONTEXTOne thread.
Every next step.
ConversationCapture context ↗
WorkflowCarry state forward ↗
IntegrationConnect the tools ↗
03 / FOLLOW THROUGHAutomation.
With judgment.
Retries & fallbacks Human review Audit trails
CONCEPTUAL PRODUCT VIEWCommunications → context → action
THE ENGINEERING BEHIND IT

Preserve state. Handle the failure paths. Make the work reviewable.

Read the case studies

01.2 / THE FOUNDER’S PRACTICE

One founder.
Both sides of the work.

Business development by day. Engineering by night.
The same problem, seen from two perspectives.

DAY / DISCOVERYAsk better
questions.

Listen to the customer.
Find the constraint.
Decide what matters.

NIGHT / ENGINEERINGBuild better
answers.

Trace the failure.
Review the tradeoffs.
Ship the useful part.

Customer conversationsWorking software

AI accelerates the mechanical work.
I own the direction, the review, and the decision to ship.

Inside my operating loop

02 / UNDER THE SURFACE

A conversation.
Not a loading screen.

Building voice AI taught me that latency is part of the product.
The small handoffs are what make a conversation feel natural.

VOICE PIPELINEILLUSTRATED HANDOFF / NOT A LIVE SESSION
01 / INPUT

A person speaks.

Speech → context

02 / GENERATION

Meaning, in pieces.

First useful clause
for await (const chunk of stream)yield nextClause;

Context → streamed text

03 / RESPONSE

The reply begins.

Streamed text → speech

Stream the first clause to speech while the rest of the response is still being generated.
01 / STREAM

Start with a clause.

Pass useful text to speech as it arrives, without waiting for the entire response.

02 / PREPARE

Warm the cold paths.

Prepare infrequently used paths at call start so they don’t interrupt the conversation.

03 / RECOVER

Make waiting explicit.

Bound upstream timeouts and use a fallback when a response takes too long.

Read the engineering note

03 / THE PERSON BEHIND THE WORK

Close to the customer.
Closer to the code.

I’m Max, an engineer and founder. At Amazon/AWS, I worked across forecasting, advertising attribution, security, and customer support. Now I’m building SaledaAI.

I care about the translation: turning a vague problem into a clear workflow, then into software someone can actually use. Staying close to both the business and the system is how I decide what deserves to be built.

More about me
“Business development tells me what matters. Engineering tells me what it costs.”From my notes on building SaledaAI

04 / FIELD NOTES

Thinking in public.

All writing
May 2026

One founder, 300k lines: building an AI-native legal SaaS without a team

5 min readMay 2026

This site is an operating log, not a brochure

2 min readApr 2026

What shipping a voice AI product taught me about latency

2 min read

05 / NEXT CONVERSATION

Something worth
building?

Tell me what you’re working on,
where it gets difficult, and what comes next.

max@saleda.ai