Max Kuklin
London, United Kingdom | hi@mkuk.dev | +44 7429 281 116 | linkedin.com/in/max-kuklin
Professional Summary
Product-minded Staff/Principal-level software engineer with 15+ years of experience building scalable distributed systems and managing high-performing teams. I thrive in high-autonomy environments where I can leverage broad technical expertise in backend, platforms, and applied AI to solve important business problems.
Open to senior IC and lean engineering leadership roles focused on applied AI, platform engineering, or developer experience.
Technical Skills
Backend & Distributed Systems: Node.js,
JavaScript, microservices, event-driven architectures (Kafka), REST
APIs
Datastores: PostgreSQL, Oracle, MySQL, Redis; schema
design, migrations, performance tuning
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EKS, EC2, S3, Route
53), Kubernetes, Docker, Istio, autoscaling, cost optimization
Observability & Reliability: Grafana, Prometheus,
distributed tracing, alerting, SLOs
Applied AI / LLMs: Production LLM integration, RAG over
relational data, vector search, prompt engineering & evaluation,
lightweight fine-tuning, MCP server development
Leadership & Delivery: Technical strategy,
engineering management, CI/CD design, architecture reviews, agile
product delivery
Professional Experience
Principal Engineer / Director of Engineering (IC) - M3 Global Research
July 2023 - Present
- Transitioned from people management to a senior IC role to own high-impact architectural work and guide solutions to complex, organization-wide problems.
- Architected a RAG-based sales proposal generator using LLMs and vector search to interpret complex healthcare requirements, enabling rapid creation of targeted case studies from historical data.
- Engineered a custom database migration system handling 2TB+ of data and thousands of tables, ensuring reliable schema evolution at a scale where standard tools failed.
- Developed intelligent email delivery system orchestrating multiple servers, managing sender reputation and achieving 98% deliverability for 1M+ emails a month.
Director of Engineering - M3 Global Research
July 2021 - June 2023
- Led a cross-functional team of 8+ engineers (backend, frontend, design), owning hiring, mentoring, and performance management to grow capability and raise delivery standards.
- Developed an observability platform (Grafana + Prometheus) for infrastructure and business metrics monitoring and alerting.
- Implemented Kubernetes autoscaling on AWS Spot Instances, cutting cloud spend by 20%.
- Established automated testing strategies across multiple tech stacks.
Lead Software Engineer - M3 Global Research
February 2018 - June 2021
- Architected a payment system processing 1M+ transactions/year across 36 countries, saving over $150K annually.
- Managed development of a multi-brand customer-facing platform, reducing integration time and costs for newly acquired companies.
- Transitioned legacy systems to microservice architecture with Node.js, PostgreSQL, Kafka.
- Built CI/CD pipelines enabling automatic testing, security auditing, and zero-downtime releases.
Senior Software Engineer - M3 Global Research
June 2011 - January 2018
- Introduced MVC-based development framework; delivered internal tools for 500+ employees and 100K+ customers.
- Built in-house survey builder enabling 6,000+ surveys/year programmed without licensing costs.
- Developed a bidding system contributing to 30% YoY sales growth.
Software Engineer - Xtenda
October 2009 - May 2011
- Developed and maintained e-commerce and internal platforms for UK clients.
- Built coupon-aggregator website integrating multiple vendor APIs.
Education
Associate Degree in Computer Science
Mari El State Engineering College (September 2004 - June 2008)