CURRICULUM VITAE

MAX PAGELS

contact@maxpagels.com
2026 — Present

Open to discussions

Currently on gardening leave. Interested in working on the hardest technical problems in the machine learning and optimisation space, either as an employee, freelancer, or founder. Also interested in pre-seed investing in projects I feel I can be of use to.

2022 — 2026

Head of Technology, Marimekko

Work in the technology unit on several modernisation projects, both frontend and event-driven backend architectures. Renewed marimekko.com, launched two mobile applications, and a storefront dedicated to personalised fashion. Primary responsible for critical systems including payment processing (charges, holds, automatic refunds) and high-availability hosting.

2021 — 2023

Head of Technology, Fourkind / Thoughtworks

Primary responsible for country-level technology strategy, with specialisations for machine learning applications. Client work, including bidding algorithms for second-price advertisement auctions under partial information for ten-digit annual budgets.

2017 — 2021

Machine Learning Partner, Fourkind

Consulting work & partner at a machine learning specialist house. Implemented several real-time learning and batch systems for non-stationary problems across telecommunications (churn reduction and treatment) and the fashion industry (real-time webpage optimisation).

2015 — 2017

Developer / Senior Developer / Data Science Specialist, SC5

Frontend and backend engineering, focusing on cloud systems. Reactive programming for the largest ecommerce business in Finland. Built some of the first real-time contextual bandit learning systems for high volume recommendations in the Nordics. Thrice awarded for performance in annual company ceremonies.

Education

MSc, Computer Science, University of Helsinki; major in software systems, extended minor in mathematics and statistics. Natively trilingual (Swedish, Finnish, English).

Military service

Finnish Defence Forces reservist.

Select Papers

Improving the Delivery Cycle: A Multiple-Case Study of the Toolchains in Finnish Software Intensive Enterprises, IST, 2016

The Highways and Country Roads to Continuous Deployment, IEEE Software, 2015

A Behavior Marker tool for measurement of the Non-Technical Skills of Software Professionals: An Empirical Investigation, SEKE, 2015

Examining the Structure of Lean and Agile Values Among Software Developers, XP, 2014

Summary

Primary domain: online (incremental) machine learning systems -- algorithms that update model parameters per-observation in O(1) amortised time rather than requiring full batch retraining. Applied focus on contextual bandits, off-policy evaluation (IPS, DR, doubly-robust estimators), and reward estimation under partial feedback. Experience in causal estimation and author of Formative, a causal estimation library. Authored the Vowpal Wabbit off-policy evaluation tutorial in the official documentation.

Secondary domains: linear and mixed-integer optimisation (LP/MIP formulations for scheduling, routing and resource allocation), time-series and signals analysis (spectral methods, online anomaly detection), and distributed backend architectures for real-time inference (streaming ingestion, feature stores, sub-millisecond serving layers).

Public talks on contextual bandits, bandit algorithms, and cloud-native ML at Aalto University, Junction Helsinki and Helsinki Reinforcement Learning meetup.