Georgia Institute of Technology
Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science · Machine Learning
Tel Aviv
New York
San Francisco
Hi, I’m Max.
I’m an AI/ML engineer who combines deep technical work with strong customer-facing and business skills.
About Me
I was born in Tel Aviv, grew up in California, and am now based back in Tel Aviv, having previously spent time in San Francisco and New York.
I studied computer science and cognitive science at UCLA, where I also took elective courses at UCLA Anderson. I later earned a master’s degree in computer science from Georgia Tech, with a focus on machine learning.
I’ve spent the past few years at early-stage startups, building AI systems and translating between customers, business stakeholders, and technical teams. I’m especially interested in applied AI, LLMs and agents, search and retrieval, AI infrastructure, and ML engineering.
Outside of work, I enjoy skiing, golf, tennis, and traveling the world. English is my native language, and I also speak Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese.
Education
University of California, Los Angeles
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science and Cognitive Science
Core Skills
AI/ML Engineering
Building applied AI systems and product capabilities in an early-stage environment, working across models, data, infrastructure, and software.
Customer-Facing Engineering
Experience across forward-deployed engineering, sales engineering, and direct customer interaction—translating business needs into clear technical requirements and practical solutions.
Software & Product Engineering
Worked across startups and technology companies on machine learning, search and retrieval, mobility, product engineering, and data infrastructure.
Stakeholder Management
Aligning customers, business leaders, product partners, and technical teams around priorities, tradeoffs, and shared outcomes.
Writings
Open Weights Are Good for Business, but Awkward for the AI Labs
August 9, 2026 · Open-weight models, business adoption, and the economics of frontier AI labs.
From Cyber Nation to AI Nation: Can Israel Reinvent Its Brand?
April 4, 2026 · Israel, artificial intelligence, and the shift from applied to foundational innovation.
Building a Language Model From Scratch With Nothing But NumPy
March 2, 2026 · Building a language model and transformer from first principles without ML frameworks.
Phishing Detector — Autonomous Agent via Claude 4 and MCP
October 26, 2025 · An autonomous phishing-detection agent using Claude and the Model Context Protocol.
Natural Language Processing of 100,000 Climate Change Tweets
November 8, 2023 · Sentiment analysis and natural language processing at social-media scale.
Predicting Water Potability Using Machine Learning
November 7, 2023 · Comparing machine-learning models for water-safety prediction.
Contact
I’m always interested in meeting thoughtful people working on hard technical and product problems.
maxmatkovski [at] gmail [dot] com