Max Wegman

Poolside is a frontier AI company building models and systems for software development. We deploy these into high-security environments. We're currently a lean team of 170, remotely distributed across EMEA and Americas. We've got a lot of compute (10000 H200s), and we have a step-change increase in capacity coming in early 2026. I'm supporting the growth of our Applied Research and Engineering teams. Check us out: https://poolside.ai/careers

Led talent acquisition for Aleph Alpha Research, scaling an R&D team building transparent and trustworthy LLMs for Europe.

Through my success as a technical recruiter with Parity, I was offered to join a team putting together an inspirational, on-site, rigorous Web3 training course called the Polkadot Blockchain Academy. This introduced me to a more holistic view of talent sourcing and generation in a global context, with 3-5 week-long assignments in APAC (HK/SG), USA, and UK. Some key contributions: Led program creation and development of a new business track Sourced and built partnerships with expert program faculty, collaborators, investors (~30 contributors per program) Co-executed volume recruiting of technical & non-technical talent (100/cohort, 3x/year) Placed program graduates within Polkadot ecosystem (part of joint team effort resulting in at least 60% of hundreds of graduates working full-/part- time in Polkadot)

I was the first in-house tech recruiter at Parity, where I helped hire globally-distributed rust, systems, and research engineers spanning a tremendous breadth of engineering topics related to blockchain protocol development, consensus, networking, distributed systems, databases, performance, testing, language development, smart contracts, Wasm, bridging, developer tooling, end-user applications and experiences... and even more! I also led the growth of the recruiting team from 3 members to 10+ and improved our recruiting processes and data capture. In a very flat team structure, I learned a lot of lessons (some of which I learned the hard way) about leadership, scaling a recruiting team, and organizational growth in general. All-in-all, it was a career-defining experience for me.

Helped a SaaS eCommerce startup more than double its workforce across nearly all job functions and levels of seniority. Sellics was acquired by Perpetua following my departure. My work included: managing full recruiting cycle from job posting to hiring, active sourcing of candidates, screening applications, conducting phone/position/case study interviews, closing offers, and ensuring a good hand-off to People Ops for employee onboarding. I had a steady rate of 2-3 hires/month across all seniorities in technical and non-technical roles.

Worked with team of attorneys and paralegals on Foreclosure Provention Project of NYLAG's Consumer Protection Unit to assist low- and middle-income clients with foreclosure and other property/estate issues in New York City and Long Island. My main responsibilities included intaking clients, drafting legal papers, and managing real estate transactions.

Shadowed/assisted attorneys providing legal advice and representation to tenants facing eviction in Rochester's Landlord-Tenant Court.

Economic/housing policy research.

Interned with Treasury Services Department, received offer for return internship and full-time position.

Bachelor studies in Budapest during exchange semester.