AI & LLM enablement
Take AI coding assistants, agents, and LLM workflows from pilot to practical use. RAG and MCP integrations, evaluation, guardrails, and the team habits that make adoption stick.
Booking consulting, speaking & advisory work
Maxwell Power
- DevSecOps & Platform
- AI & LLM Enablement
- Customer Success Architecture
- Speaker
Solve the hard problems. Get teams moving. Deliver when it matters.
I help teams ship reliable software, put AI to practical use, and earn their customers' trust. Bring me in for hands-on delivery, a clear technical direction, or a practical talk grounded in work I've actually done.
Daily
hands-on with LLMs & AI agents
$7.5M+
enterprise portfolios managed across roles
70+
enterprise accounts guided
F100
startups to Fortune 100
01 How I can help
Senior, hands-on consulting, advisory, and delivery for teams with a hard problem to solve.
DevSecOps & CI/CD
Improve how software gets built, secured, and shipped. Hands-on help with GitHub and GitLab, CI/CD pipelines, and platform migrations. Bring development, security, and operations together without adding friction to delivery.
Platform reliability & infrastructure
Design and troubleshoot enterprise infrastructure for availability and recovery: storage performance, database replication, distributed deployments, and disaster recovery. Hands-on with Linux, Unix, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Customer Success & TAM programs
Stand up or overhaul Customer Success and Technical Account Management with segmentation, playbooks, health scoring, and useful business reviews. Connect customers' technical needs with adoption, renewals, and expansion.
Escalations & launches
The calm in the storm. I step into critical escalations, go-lives, and at-risk accounts, restore confidence with executives, and leave a process behind to reduce the chance of a repeat.
Secure collaboration & compliance
Self-hosted, regulated deployments of collaboration and developer tooling, plus GDPR/CCPA privacy and consent integrations.
02 Experience behind the advice
$4M+ enterprise portfolio
Trusted technical adviser to 20+ high-profile accounts in Fortune 500 tech, automotive, finance, consumer goods, life sciences, and energy. Worked with everyone from the on-call engineer to the CIO.
Building GitLab's early TAM practice
An early member of GitLab's Technical Account Management team, helping build and grow its commercial customer work. Managed $3.5M+ across 50+ accounts.
Mission-critical secure data centres
At Oracle, kept StorageTek, Sun, and Exa engineered systems running in enterprise and government data centres across Canada and the US. Hands-on enterprise hardware and storage work grounds my approach to reliability architecture.
Open-source development
Built Acuparse, an open-source PHP application that captures, stores, and displays weather-station data. A concrete example of the development work behind my systems and customer-facing experience.
Explore Acuparse on GitHub03 Ways to work together
Start with a short, free fit conversation. We'll agree on the outcome, scope, and fee before the work begins.
Advisory sprint
Rates on request
A focused 1–2 week deep dive with a clear, prioritized plan.
- Current-state assessment & stakeholder interviews
- Risk, gap, and opportunity report
- 90-day roadmap you can execute
Project delivery
Rates on request
Fixed-scope, fixed-fee delivery of a defined outcome.
- AI rollout, migration, pipeline, or CS program build-out
- Weekly progress & executive-ready reporting
- Documentation and team hand-off included
Fractional expert
Rates on request
Senior help on retainer, without a full-time hire.
- Fractional Head of CS / TAM / Support
- On-call escalation & architecture advice
- Hiring, coaching, and playbook ownership
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01
Discover
Understand the business, the people, and what "done" looks like.
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02
Plan
Agree on scope, success metrics, and the fee or retainer.
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03
Deliver
Hands-on execution with transparent, weekly check-ins.
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04
Hand off
Docs, training, and a team that owns it after I'm gone.
04 Speaking & workshops
Practical talks about systems, people, and pressure, from data centres and developer platforms to the bar and the boardroom. Bring your team a workshop they can use, or your audience a story that stays with them.
From help desk to AI agents
A first-hand tour of how software is built, shipped, and supported, and what that history tells us about where AI is taking engineering teams next.
Inside the DevSecOps shift
Lessons from scaling an early GitLab customer team and guiding enterprises through the move to modern CI/CD and the cloud.
AI-assisted development that sticks
How to roll out AI coding assistants and agents in real enterprises, build trust, put guardrails in place, measure results, and get past the pilot.
From the bar to the boardroom
What hospitality teaches technical customer success: how the best TAM and CS teams read the room, stay calm under pressure, turn escalations into references, and earn the right to expand.
Secure, self-hosted, and air-gapped
What it really takes to run collaboration and developer platforms in regulated and high-security environments. Architecture trade-offs around redundancy, replication, storage performance, and recovery when a component or an entire site fails.
The long way home
A personal keynote about searching for and finding the father I never knew, and what that journey taught me about identity, resilience, and second acts.
Available for
- Keynotes
- Conference talks
- Panels & fireside chats
- Workshops & training
- Meetups & user groups
- Podcasts & livestreams
- Internal lunch-and-learns
- Guest writing
- Cruise & travel enrichment talks
Speaker bio
Maxwell Power is a technical consultant and speaker working where systems, people, and pressure meet. His background spans mission-critical infrastructure at Oracle, GitLab's early Technical Account Management team, and strategic enterprise accounts at Mattermost. He built the open-source weather application Acuparse and brings a hospitality perspective to technical customer work. His talks and workshops cover practical AI adoption, DevSecOps, reliability, and earning customer trust.
Now writing
A memoir, in progress
I'm writing a book about growing up without knowing my real dad, finding him, and everything that came after. Want to hear when it's ready, or have me tell the story on your stage?
Get book updates
05 Where I've been
From hands-on infrastructure to developer platforms and enterprise customer work, with independent consulting alongside full-time roles.
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Today
Customer reliability at global scale
Partnering with some of the world's largest engineering organizations to keep the developer platforms they depend on reliable, secure, and ready for AI-assisted development.
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Ongoing
Independent consulting
Contract and consulting work alongside full-time roles, including hands-on engagements with early-stage companies in high-speed network engineering, SaaS implementation, and customer success.
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2023 – 2025
Customer Reliability Engineer to Senior Technical Account Manager · Mattermost
Started in customer reliability engineering, supporting enterprise deployments before moving into Technical Account Management. Owned strategic enterprise accounts running secure, self-hosted collaboration. Led executive business reviews, upgrades, escalations, and expansions as the customer's technical voice inside the company.
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2022
Technical Account Manager · TrustArc
Guided global enterprises and non-profits through GDPR and CCPA privacy, consent-management, and compliance integrations. Getting it wrong is a regulatory problem, not just a bug.
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2019 – 2021
Technical Account Manager · GitLab
Joined GitLab's Technical Account Management team early and helped build its commercial customer work. Guided enterprises through DevSecOps transformations and cloud migrations.
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Earlier
Field Support Engineer · Oracle
On-call support for StorageTek, Sun, and Exa engineered systems in high-security enterprise and government data centres across energy, utilities, telecom, engineering, and the public sector, where reliability is mission-critical.
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Earlier
Contract IT, network & field engineering · IBM · Deloitte · Schlumberger · Shaw
Contract and agency placements across energy, engineering, professional services, and government. Worked on enterprise help desks, network analysis, field support, cable, and a large energy-sector desktop rollout. The foundation for everything since.
06 Behind the bar, too
Long before the data centres, I was in service, and I've never really left. I've tended bar at event venues and worked banquet service, and I still pick up shifts because I love it. That mix makes me useful to bars, restaurants, and event teams in two ways:
Bar & restaurant tech consulting
POS, payments, Wi-Fi and networking, online ordering, scheduling, and the automation that frees your team up to serve.
Event bartending & banquet service
A friendly, experienced pair of hands for private events, corporate functions, and busy nights.
07 What working with me looks like
- Direct conversations about the technical problem, the business consequences, and what can realistically be done.
- Hands-on execution, clear decisions, and documentation your team can use.
- A calm, practical approach when customers, deadlines, and reliability are all on the line.
- Remote-first across North American time zones, with travel for on-site work, events, or a stage at sea.
- Engagements scoped to avoid any conflict with existing commitments. This is me, not my employer.
Tools & disciplines
- GitHub · GitLab
- GitLab Certified CI/CD
- Jira · Bitbucket
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- AWS · GCP · Azure · OCI
- Linux & Solaris
- High-availability architecture
- RAID · Storage I/O · Database replication
- Disaster recovery
- LLMs & AI agents
- RAG · MCP
- Python · Bash · Node.js
- PHP · Open-source development
- Prometheus · Grafana
- Networking · IPv6 · BGP
- Telecom & VoIP
- Customer Success
- GDPR / CCPA
Let's talk
A project, an event, or a difficult technical problem: tell me what you're working on. I read every message myself and aim to reply within one business day.
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Based in Alberta, Canada, working remotely