Max Ellis

Achievements

Notable milestones, awards, and accomplishments.

Rapid Career Progression
Career Growth

Progressed from Junior to Senior Software Engineer in under 3 years at Act-On Software, demonstrating exceptional proficiency across the modern tech stack.

Sole Backend Engineer — AI Product Replacement
LeadershipAI

Selected as the sole backend engineer to architect and deliver a ground-up replacement of a partner AI product under a 3-month deadline, building multi-agent RAG infrastructure with AWS Bedrock.

17% Email Open Rate Increase
ImpactAI

Built a subject line optimizer using AWS Bedrock that analyzes top and bottom performing subject lines, driving a 17% increase in customer email open rates.

50-Page Business Proposal Adopted by Leadership
StrategyLeadership

Authored a comprehensive 50-page business proposal outlining a marketing strategy, sales strategy, and 15 project initiatives. The core thesis — shifting towards AI-driven products — was adopted as company direction, and the sales strategy was implemented.

Published Researcher — IEEE TSE 2022
Academia

Max Ellis, Sarah Nadi, and Danny Dig. "Operation-based Refactoring-aware Merging: An Empirical Evaluation". In: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE 2022).

View Preprint
4.0 GPA — Master's Degree
Academia

Achieved a perfect 4.0 GPA in M.Sc Computing Science at the University of Alberta.

OSWALD Award — Clark College
Award

Received the OSWALD Award (Outstanding Students With Academic Leadership and Development Skills), Clark College's annual recognition for students demonstrating outstanding achievement in academics, leadership, and service.

Infrastructure Automation
Impact

Reduced connector setup time from several hours to under 20 minutes by automating OpenFlow provisioning with Terraform, including VPCs, subnets, security groups, IAM roles, and HashiCorp Vault rules.