Adam Makai

Working as a contractor with Instructure’s Identity Management / Core Identity Services team on the successor to a legacy Canvas identity/authentication system. Focus areas: • Shared Identity Platform foundations for Instructure products • Authentication, authorization, and self-service authentication provider configuration • Security hardening following a public 2026 Canvas/Instructure security incident • Collaboration with security, audit, and engineering stakeholders • Monitoring, alerting, operational readiness, and runbooks • Proposed security features adopted into the platform roadmap, including a custom time-lock mechanism owned from specification through rollout

• Collaborate on the design and implementation of a new highly scalable live services architecture, supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent users and millions of events/messages per second while ensuring strong consistency in distributed systems; address legacy issues like race conditions and poor maintainability. • Contribute from the project’s inception, including discovery and planning phases: select and validate the Raft consensus algorithm through testing and proofs-of-concept (PoCs), design infrastructure and architecture, and implement clients/servers in NestJS with long-term SaaS product viability in mind (starting with internal usage for validation). • Maintain and iteratively improve the existing system by migrating components to TypeScript and NestJS, enhancing overall maintainability and operational efficiency. • Serve as the team’s AI integration lead, incorporating advanced tools to support scalable backend solutions.

• Played a significant role as a key contributor driving the Open Banking initiative, focusing on PSD2 compliance, instant payments, and crafting integration tools and SDKs that enhanced developer adoption and regulatory compliance. • Led planning and design of new integration tools and SDKs for both internal and external developers, primarily using NestJS and TypeScript, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and alignment with company strategic goals. • Collaborated on a company-wide project introducing a consistent error tracking and handling solution, significantly enhancing service quality and reducing debugging time across all development teams. • Contributed to refining and automating alerting and incident reporting systems, improving the on-call experience for developers and reducing incident response times. • Demonstrated adaptability by rapidly mastering new tools and languages including Kotlin, Apache Flink, and Kafka as project requirements evolved, maintaining development velocity during technology transitions. • Maintained regular communication with senior management, providing technical insights and progress updates to ensure engineering initiatives aligned with business objectives until company operations ceased.

• Led a team of 7 developers in an agile environment, fostering collaboration and ensuring effective communication between frontend and backend team members. • Translated business objectives into actionable technical requirements, cooperating with stakeholders to ensure alignment between business goals and technical solutions. • Played a pivotal role in architecting and overseeing the transition from legacy systems to modern, scalable microservices, ensuring architectural integrity, scalability, and maintainability. • Actively contributed to backend development, emphasizing maintainable and readable code, while also guiding the team in implementing architectural best practices. • Made high-level decisions on technology choices, integration patterns, and infrastructure, drawing from a deep understanding of system design and architecture. • Facilitated remote collaboration, with periodic in-person meetings in Budapest, and London for strategic alignment.

• Integral member of the LOX team, focusing on the development of IBM Cloud’s new Offering Catalog system, a pivotal component of the IBM Cloud ecosystem. • Utilised GraphQL, React, and Apollo to modernise and replace legacy systems. • Assumed the role of Compliance Focal, ensuring the product adhered to stringent external regulations like FedRAMP and GDPR, as well as IBM’s internal standards.

• Developed and sustained a kid-safe video player, enabling major brands like Mattel to serve millions of videos weekly in compliance with COPPA/GDPR-K. • Led the transformation of legacy services using modern technologies like NestJS, GraphQL, and Angular 8. • Triumphed in the internal HackDay competition by creating an Alexa-enabled Android smart TV video app, later contributing to its evolution into a customer product.

- Relocated to the UK for career advancement and a shift to full-stack development. Served as the company’s first on-site engineer while building and maintaining a web application for an exclusive global network of executive leaders.

• Co-led Egora Media Kft. (March 2012 – March 2016), creating academic e-books and e-learning materials with interactive features like charts, videos, and tests; collaborated with clients including Eötvös Loránd University, Karoli Gaspar University, and L’Harmattan publisher. Developed websites for Hungarian cultural projects using HTML5, CSS3, XHTML, InDesign, Photoshop, e-book, and e-learning tools. • Founded and served as CTO for Urstory.io and Getcloz.io (April 2015 – March 2016), providing technical advice, strategic decisions, and MVP development with JavaScript, AngularJS, Photoshop, UX/UI, and wireframing. Gained product-focused insights and business-tech perspective through early startup phases, despite eventual closure. • Contributed to BaseWalk Kft. (May 2016 – February 2017) as Frontend Developer, building user interfaces for the TaskFit desktop application and spearheading the online dashboard’s productivity features with enriched reporting and charts, using JavaScript, AngularJS, CSS3, Gulp, Bower, JavaEE, YouTrack, and Jenkins. • Relocated to London for career advancement, maintaining remote support for a smooth team transition.