Michael Maximilien is a Distinguished Engineer and member of the leadership team for IBM Research, where he leads Quantum services and in particular post-quantum safe cryptography. He’s part of the team working to make IBM, the open source community, and the world quantum safe from “harvest now, decrypt later” cyberattacks. Max is a 2002 MS grad, and 2005 PhD alumni in Computer Science.

His previous roles include working with IBM Cloud Labs as the CTO for IBM Open Technology and Chief Architect for Cloud Innovations. He was also one of three leaders for the Cloud Foundry Organization, and a committer and contributor to the Open Source Software Knative Serverless project Other contributions

Max has conducted pioneering research on semantic Web services, API mashups, and cloud computing, and platform-as-a-service. Before joining IBM Research in Almaden, he worked for IBM Research Triangle Park, where he was architect for the IBM retail store WebSphere backend system as well as one of the architects and principal engineer for the worldwide industry point-of-sale standard: JavaPOS.

Dr. Maximilien has published over 75 refereed papers with a citation count on Google Scholar of over 6000. An IBM Sixth Plateau Invention Achievement Award winner, he is an inventor named on more than 20 issued US patents with 3 pending. Max has been active in the Software Engineering, Cloud, and Web Computing community. He has chaired several international conferences as well as served as associated editor for journals in those areas.

Max has received over 10 IBM awards including one research award, three excellence awards, and three outstanding innovation awards (IBM’s highest technical award). He was named the most valuable open source contributor to the Cloud Foundry community in 2018 and was the co-recipient of a Ruby Innovator award from the Japanese Fukuoka prefecture in 2012. In 2020, he was selected as an IBM Distinguished Engineer, one of IBM’s highest technical honors.