I build the data & AI systems companies actually run on.
I’m Maxim Berge. An engineer and founder who turns messy, unstructured reality into production systems that ship. Eight years across ML, data engineering and infrastructure. Available as a fractional CTO & technical advisor.
A builder, not a consultant.
The brief is always the same: act as if it were my company. I don’t hand over a deck and leave — I write the code, design the architecture, hire the engineers, and own the outcome. It’s just me, senior and hands-on, not an agency, taking on a small number of deep, technical engagements at a time.
Five ways to deploy me.
It starts with strategy and ends with something shipped — every engagement scoped, written down, and built around a concrete outcome. Two to four open slots per quarter.
AI & data strategy
roadmapbuild vs buyai leverage0→1For founders, CEOs and boards deciding what to build — and where AI and data create real leverage instead of noise. I turn business goals into a technical roadmap, a clear build-vs-buy call, and a sequencing plan you can actually fund. Strategy from someone who then ships it — not a deck that stops at the recommendation.
Fractional CTO
Senior technical leadership without the full-time hire. Architecture, hiring, AI/data, infrastructure and day-to-day delivery under one head.
hiringarchitectureai/datadeliveryBoard & advisory
Non-executive director and technical advisor seats for technology-led companies. Strategy, hiring oversight and a technical sanity-check on a quarterly cadence.
nedadvisorygovernanceEngineering diligence
Independent technical audits for investors and acquirers — architecture, team, security posture and hidden risk, assessed by an engineer who has shipped it.
vc / peauditm&aBuild engagements
Hands-on work on high-leverage problems: scraping at scale, AI pipelines, embeddings & semantic search, ETL, FastAPI services, cloud foundations.
pythonmlscrapingaws/gcpTrack record, measured.
A short readout of what has happened on my watch — observed, not projected.
The path, as a time series
Eight years on one axis. The throughline is the point — I never stopped building; teaching, then leadership, layered on top.
What the team reported back.
Selected, lightly trimmed, from public LinkedIn recommendations.
Same team · BeCode
Former manager
Former direct report
Former coachee