BM Brent Maxwell

Professional

A career in scaling teams and shipping product

Three-time CTO. Former Senior Solutions Architect at AWS. Most recently Head of Technology at Synthetix, where I rebuilt the organisation and shipped a high-frequency derivatives exchange in four months. Below: the threads that recur across roles, then the chronology.

Themes across the career

Eight threads that recur across different companies and decades. Follow any thread to the roles that exemplify it.

  1. Engineering Velocity

    Transforming engineering organisations to ship faster, more reliably, and with higher quality -- from fortnightly cadences to daily deploys to multi-billion-dollar exchanges built in months.

    4 roles

  2. AI & LLM Systems

    Designing production AI systems that beat the latency and reliability of off-the-shelf APIs, and redesigning software development lifecycles around agentic AI.

    2 roles

  3. Zero-to-One Building

    Founding and bootstrapping companies, standing up entirely new business functions, and getting products from napkin to paying customers.

    4 roles

  4. Data & Analytics

    Building low-cost, high-throughput data platforms and self-service analytics capabilities that turn organisations into data-centric businesses.

    3 roles

  5. Web3 & DeFi

    Designing player-owned economies, launching tokens and NFT mints, and leading a top-tier derivatives protocol through its evolution into a retail SaaS exchange.

    2 roles

  6. Org Design & Leadership

    Building high-performing engineering organisations, nurturing leaders to run them, and reshaping companies to match the problems they are actually solving.

    4 roles

  7. Scale & Performance

    Shipping systems that hold up under real load: 80K concurrent MMO sessions, sub-100ms exchange APIs, sub-200ms LLM responses, and multi-TB daily data pipelines.

    5 roles

  8. GTM & Commercial

    Driving measurable commercial outcomes -- growing ARR, co-leading eight-figure deals, and orchestrating product launches that generate serious revenue in days.

    6 roles

Timeline

7 roles, most recent first. Jump to a role directly or return to the themes.

Head of Technology

Synthetix Remote / Sydney

(1 yr 8 mo)

Leading the technology function at Synthetix, a FinTech organisation focused on derivatives with a perpetual futures exchange as the flagship product. Transformed the entire business around a new technology stack and ways of working to build the next incarnation of the futures exchange faster than anyone has done it before.

  • $3B+ Exchange volume since beta
  • <100ms E2E API latency (avg)
  • 4 months vs 4 years Build time vs industry norm
  • -25% Headcount reduction
  • Ground-up build of a high-frequency perpetual futures exchange in under 6 months to a successful December 2025 launch -- the fastest a futures exchange has been built is 4 years; we achieved most of the build in 4 months
  • Redesigned the software development lifecycle to optimise for agentic AI-driven development
  • Completely redesigned the organisation from a smart-contracts flat structure to a lean, cloud, product-led SaaS business
  • Rehired 90% of the technology function while reducing company headcount 25%
  • Between beta (Nov 2025) and public launch, the exchange did over $3B of trading volume
  • Negotiated ~$USD100k of AWS credits to bootstrap the project

Founder & CEO

SalesMuse Sydney

(6 mo)

SalesMuse was an AI phone-sales co-pilot that steered conversations by providing realtime guidance to the salesperson. Bootstrapped with 7 staff (~4 FTE) and developed to deployment-ready, but the business model turned out not to be viable.

  • <200ms LLM response latency (~1000 tok)
  • ~4000/min Peak LLM throughput
  • >90% Zero-shot accuracy
  • 8 Design partners
  • Beat the performance benchmarks of every publicly available LLM API -- responses under 200ms for ~1000 tokens (best 3rd-party P95 was ~800ms, too slow for realtime)
  • Achieved throughput of ~4000 LLM calls/minute, far higher than typical AI products making <10/minute
  • Benchmarked over 10 AI API providers and 15+ models
  • Achieved >90% accuracy on zero-shot responses meeting quality requirements
  • Brought 8 design partners on board, the largest with ~4000 phone-sales staff

Chief Executive Officer

DEFY Labs Remote

(1 yr)

DEFY Labs was a seed-funded ($USD3.5M) web3 mobile game studio focused on location-based gaming and player-owned blockchain assets. DEFY was a location-based MMO in which players took on an evil corporation, Future Systems. Brought in to drive strategy and execution based on my technical and product expertise.

  • 80K Peak concurrent MMO sessions
  • $1.2M in 13 min NFT mint revenue (peak)
  • ~$2M Cumulative NFT revenue
  • <6 months Time to launch MMO
  • Launched a fully functional MMO on iOS and Android in under 6 months, navigating complex monetisation, crypto, and NFT rules from Apple and Google
  • Ran the largest and fastest NFT mint ever recorded on Polygon: 8,000 NFTs sold out in 13 minutes for $USD1.2M+
  • Multiple NFT mints cumulatively generated ~$USD2M revenue
  • Launched the $DEFY cryptocurrency on QuickSwap DEX and Bybit CEX
  • Designed a world-first web3 economy encouraging value creation through player-to-player training, crafting, and destruction of NFT assets
  • Scaled the MMO platform to 80,000 concurrent active sessions using AWS ECS, Aurora Postgres, S3, PubNub, and DynamoDB
  • Fully multilingual product, marketplace, blog, website, and marketing -- including strong presence in Japanese
  • Grew to 50,000+ Twitter followers and 45,000 Discord participants

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer

Emergency Procedures Sydney

(3 yr 10 mo)

Video demonstrations of research-based methods for emergency medical procedures. All procedures are referenced and accompanied by supporting information to improve patient outcomes. A casual role -- I manage the commercial and technical sides of the business.

  • 3,000+ Daily active emergency doctors
  • $100K Prince of Wales Foundation grant
  • Supported by the World Health Organization (WHO)
  • Won the largest grant ever provided by the Prince of Wales Foundation -- $100,000
  • Used daily by over 3,000 emergency doctors around the world, primarily UK, US, and Australia

Senior Solutions Architect

Amazon Web Services Sydney

(2 yr 7 mo)

Senior Solutions Architect in the Partner segment and then Enterprise, working tightly with sales to drive account growth across APAC. Acted as a technical leader in modern technology practices for business and technology executives, guiding them on cloud strategy and successful delivery.

  • $40M+ Co-led revenue
  • 40+ / 4.5 avg Presentations / CSAT
  • 20,000+ Audience reached
  • Co-led deals that brought in over $40M in revenue
  • Averaged 4.5 CSAT across 40+ presentations to 20,000+ people
  • Completed 20 executive briefings with strong regard from sales leaders
  • Helped create and mature the Cloud Centre of Excellence at Accenture (the Accenture AWS Business Group)
  • Built proof-of-concept demonstrations, wrote best-practice guides, and ran workshops and webinars to scale technology education across APAC

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer

Style Arcade Sydney

(7 yr 3 mo)

Style Arcade is a B2B SaaS product for fashion retailers that grows their revenue and profitability through product-performance guidance. Bootstrapped the company, joined as the 9th employee with engineers struggling, and in 6 months transformed the team from shipping fortnightly to shipping daily. Built the business to $3M ARR and $24M valuation.

  • $3M Revenue (ARR)
  • $24M Valuation
  • 2TB/day Data platform throughput
  • fortnightly -> daily Shipping cadence
  • 18 (10 eng) Team size
  • Architected a low-cost serverless data platform processing 2TB/day with flexible faceted search across 120+ dimensions
  • Grew the business to $3M ARR and a $24M valuation
  • Matured the engineering function from fortnightly to daily shipping in 6 months; grew to 18 people (10 in engineering)
  • Nurtured an excellent VP Engineering and enabled them to run the team with minimal input through heightened calibration
  • Expanded laterally from owning Technology, Legal, and HR to also owning Product, Financing, Marketing, and Sales
  • Built comprehensive development plans for every role level; formal leadership, management, and security training with measurable impact
  • Implemented MTTR, lead time, and velocity metrics; defined clear success criteria for the engineering function

Head of Data & Technology Operations

The Iconic Sydney

(3 yr 6 mo)

Hired onto the executive team to improve how the company leveraged data and analytics, and rapidly expanded into a CIO-style role covering company strategy, executive decision-making, and organisational design. Built new engineering functions, automated manual operations, and drove self-service analytics across the business.

  • ~800% ERP throughput improvement
  • $50K Annual ERP cost reduction
  • 4 New engineering teams built
  • Built a self-service analytics capability through technology enablement and company-wide cultural change (training, communication, influence, and presentations)
  • Implemented a hub-and-spoke data topology letting Finance and others access data directly or engage a central team for deeper work
  • Designed an improved data architecture and built a world-leading near-real-time data warehouse
  • Created 4 additional engineering teams and owned their roadmaps
  • Took over a struggling ERP project: reduced cost by $50K/year, improved BAU throughput by ~800%, and stood up a new ERP team
  • Led multiple system migrations (Targit -> SAP BO, SAP BO3 -> BO4, Oracle -> Redshift DWH, ERP cloud migration) with huge cost savings
  • Deep hands-on AWS experience: EC2 (ASGs, EBS, AMIs), Redshift, RDS, S3, Glacier, IAM (AD integration), SES, CloudFormation