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
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.
- 2023-2025 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
I have a Master's degree in Computer Security from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where I deepened my understanding about concepts like kernel programming, compiler optimizations and hardware vulnerabilities. I learned about how security vulnerabilities don't respect the imaginary bounds of software/hardware abstractions and implemented a compiler security mitigation for LLVM.
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. 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. 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.
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.
Data Migration Platform (Currently 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.
