Team

Defined Once is founded by two friends that are motivated to change the status quo. We are on a mission to rebuild the foundations of systems we came to rely on, and we have fun while doing so.

During their participation in the global NXP cup, Max and Elias discovered the common interest in building systems thoroughly, rather than quickly. Their emphasis lied on understanding the systems that they built, which led them to win the cup in Hamburg in 2024. In the process, they have supplied a new generation of VU Computer Science students with the Autonomous Systems Engineering (ASE) software and hardware framework, which has allowed many to graduate under their supervision.

Since then, they have been working on various technical challenges together. While the environments differed (from building high-performance Rust integrations to optimizing Kubernetes deployment pipelines), the mindset has never changed. To service clients better, they have united their forces as Defined Once in 2026 where they focus on foundational systems engineering.