Max Pagels

I enjoy tackling hard machine learning and software problems with unconventional solutions, driven by the field's blend of theory and empirical progress and a healthy frustration with convention. I maintain Formative (a quantitative reasoning library), Gittins (production-grade bandits) and Axiom (general-purpose model for causal discovery). I've worked for and with startups to Fortune 500, and have led teams in Head of Technology roles for both private and listed companies.

If you are interested in the unconventional, and are willing to accept failure in the pursuit of something genuinely innovative, please be in touch.

max.pagels@protonmail.comGitHubLinkedIn

Career

  1. 2026–Member of Technical Staff, Qutwo
  2. 2023–26Head of Technology, Marimekko
  3. 2021–23Head of Technology, Fourkind / Thoughtworks Finland
  4. 2017–21Machine Learning Partner, Fourkind
  5. 2015–17Developer → Data Science Specialist, SC5 / Nordcloud

Selected work

Contextual bandits & real-time optimisation

Built some of the first real-time contextual bandit systems for high-volume recommendations in the Nordics, and real-time webpage optimisation for fashion retail. Constraints: per-observation online updates, partial (bandit) feedback, non-stationary reward distributions, and serving inside sub-second request budgets. Evaluation done off-policy (IPS / doubly-robust) rather than on live traffic where experimentation was constrained.

Technical advisory for M&A

Technical due diligence during a 50+ MEUR acquisition, on behalf of the purchaser. Audited the defensibility, security, scalability, and quality of a SaaS product, including interviewing engineers to understand key challenges and opportunities from the expert level.

Bidding under partial information

Bidding algorithms for second-price advertisement auctions under partial information, allocating ten-digit (€1B+) annual media budgets. Constraints: censored feedback from lost auctions, budget pacing, and non-stationary competition.

Causal estimation of bonus program retention

Estimated the causal impact on retention of a third-party bonus/loyalty program carrying eight-digit (€10M+) annual license fees, to decide whether the spend was actually driving incremental behaviour. Constraints: no clean randomised holdout, confounding from self-selecting engaged users, and a decision that had to withstand scrutiny. Used instrumental-variable regression and difference-in-differences to isolate the effect; the incremental retention did not justify the fees, and the program was decommissioned, saving €10M+ annually.

High-availability payments infrastructure

Implemented payment processing (charges, holds, automatic refunds) and high-availability hosting for retail with multi-million annual revenues, alongside event-driven backends and a storefront for personalised fashion.

Global commerce replatforming

Architected and shipped a composable, event-driven commerce platform for global fashion retail: headless CMS, commerce engine, payments, tax, and personalisation services, replacing a monolithic platform that couldn't absorb traffic spikes or multi-channel content reuse. Constraints: zero-downtime migration of a live revenue stream, multi-market catalogues, pricing and tax, and content authored once but published across web, email, SMS, and B2C channels.

Clients

Veikkaus, Elisa, Sanoma Media, Wayfair, and Hennes & Mauritz.

Education

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

Writing & talks

  • Off-policy Estimation in the Agentic Era — 2026
  • On Prompting, Priors, and What It Takes for LLMs to Produce Novelty — 2026
  • Machine Learning Reductions & Mother Algorithms, Part I: Introduction — Medium
  • Machine Learning Reductions & Mother Algorithms, Part II: Multiclass to Binary Classification — Medium
  • Real-World Reinforcement Learning — Slides
  • 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