~/ team / max

Max Gallup

Last updated:
Picture of Max Gallup

From a young age I was fascinated by flight.

This quickly led to a passion for building and flying drones (a time before they were used in the battlefield). The hobby sparked a curiosity towards understanding how things work under the hood and left me eager to start a degree in Computer Science at VU Amsterdam. To feed my curiosity, I took courses that dove deep into uncovering the mysteries of the many black boxes that make up our hyper digital age. Gaining an understanding for topics "down-stack" such as compilers, operating systems and computer processors unlocked a perspective which revealed a dark, grueling reality of the status quo of foundational software. Every day that passes there's a new anxiety-inducing headline explaining how yet another gaping hole in our foundations has been found and exploited with malicious intent.

It became clear to me that we're observing a pattern unfolding as a result of technical debt from decades ago. At a time when security was simply not a high priority, certain norms built up in software engineering such as the use of memory unsafe languages -- A decision entirely justified in the context of when there simply weren't better options. Today however, there are better options and with the last few decades of accrued debt, it feels as though now would be an important moment to slow down and revisit the very foundations we rely on daily. The urgency of this problem left me motivated enough to take matters into my own hands and led to co-founding Defined Once, the embodiment of this journey.

I look forward to solving hard problems and collaborate with companies or individuals that have a problem worth fighting for. I cherish environments where honesty and direct communication are the norm and where everyone feels welcome. An important motto I like to work by and as once famously said by a financial transactions database designer:

"Do the hard thing today to make tomorrow easy" - Tiger Style



Curriculum Vitae

Career

  • 2026 Co-Founder of Defined Once Engineering B.V.
  • 2023-2025 Teaching Assistant at Department of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: designed & developed a fleet of miniature autonomous driving vehicles used by students to compete in NXP Cup in addition to being a research platform for final year projects.
  • 2024-2025 Freelance Software Engineer: Developed and maintained a data migration service with focus on automation through CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code.
  • 2019 Intern at AlphaLink Engineering GmbH: Designed and built a prototype three piece compound UAV joined together at the wingtips to improve flight efficiency.

Education

Notable University Courses

  • Hardware Security (XM_40019) - Performed side channel analysis to recover cryptographic keys and performed fault injection (voltage glitching) to achieve code execution on a micro-controller.
  • Advanced Operating Systems (XM_40014) - Implemented elementary components of the Open-LSD kernel from scratch.
  • Network Security (XM_0100) - Implemented (Mitnick’s) DNS Cache Poisoning Attack and the Kaminsky Attack.
  • Binary and Malware Analysis (X_405100) - Worked through a number of challenges around reverse engineering malware and applied various techniques such as symbolic execution, dynamic taint analysis, malware packing and obfuscation.
  • Software Security (X_400127) - Learned to find vulnerabilities and craft exploits to achieve code execution in software.
  • Compiler Construction (XB_0003) - Completed frontend for FenneC language and implemented rudimentary optimization passes in LLVM.
  • Project Autonomous Driving (XB_0045) - Constructed and programmed an autonomous vehicle to compete in the NXP Cup.
  • Advanced Network Programming (XB_0048) - Implemented part of TCP as a user-space networking stack (RFC 793).
  • Secure Programming (XB_40005) - Developed a security hardened chat program focus on encryption using OpenSSL.

Publications

  • Integrating Small-scale Autonomous Vehicles in CS Education: An Experience Report. Natalia Silvis-Cividjian, Joshua Kenyon, Maximilian Gallup, Elias Groot, Hugo van Wezenbeek, Eduardo Lira-Cossio, and Niels Althuisius. 2025. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (ITiCSE 2025). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 235-241. https://doi.org/10.1145/3724363.3729078
  • The Story of the VU-Rover and its Many Capstone Projects. Elias Groot, Maximilian Gallup, Darian Janevski, Joshua Kenyon, and Natalia Silvis-Cividjian. 2025. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 2 (ITiCSE 2025). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 723-724. https://doi.org/10.1145/3724389.3731264

Projects

Autonomous Systems Engineering (ASE)

Designed and built a fleet of 20 small-scale autonomous vehicles for the VU Amsterdam Computer Science department, used both in the annual NXP Cup autonomous driving competition and as a platform for student bachelor thesis research. The vehicles were engineered for performance and extensibility, featuring brushless motors with Field Oriented Control for precise speed management and active braking, a modular electronics layout separating power distribution from sensor connectivity, and a Debix Model A single-board Linux computer at their core.

To support student development, Elias Groot and I architected a service-oriented software framework where the autonomous driving pipeline is broken into independent, language-agnostic processes (services) that communicate over shared memory via ZMQ. This allowed students to plug in their own algorithms — whether in Go, Python, C, or C# — without reimplementing the full stack. Core services covering image processing, PID-based control, and hardware actuation were provided out of the box, alongside libraries and templates to lower the barrier to entry further.

The platform was rounded made complete with a CLI tool (roverctl client side) and a companion daemon (roverd vehicle side) that together allowed students to remotely upload custom services, manage pipelines, and stream live sensor data and camera feeds to a browser-based debug interface. The entire framework is open source and has since been used by multiple student cohorts for both competitive racing and independent research projects in areas including computer vision, LiDAR-based localization, and energy-efficient computing.

For more information see the full write-up.

Repository Documentation

Tailscale Status

Developed an open source Gnome extension for managing and viewing Tailscale connections. It features the ability to quickly view nodes in the Tailnet, copy their IP address as well as toggle between different exit nodes. Thanks to a number of open source contributors, there is also support for viewing a long list of Mullvad VPN exit nodes and the ability to configure the control plane endpoints.

Repository Release

Data Migration Platform (Closed Source)

Together with Elias, I designed and developed a data migration platform that performs real time synchronizations across various heterogeneous 3rd party data sources. The platform backend was built in Rust and deployed as a Kubernetes cluster to service internal users.