Max Buckley
Head of Knowledge Research at Exa
About Me
I’m Max Buckley, a software engineer and AI researcher with 12+ years of experience building software and ML systems at scale.
Currently, I’m heading up Knowledge Research at Exa where I also founded and lead the Zurich office. Previously I worked for 12.5 years at Google across various European offices, where I worked on all sorts of things, but ended up in information retrieval, knowledge graphs, and large language models. My work lives in that space where structured knowledge meets the messiness of real-world text—figuring out how to make AI systems that actually know things, not just predict tokens.
I’m based in Zurich, where I live with my fiance Alena Nikolskaia. I’m a part of the growing European AI research scene. I write about AI on LinkedIn (where some people apparently find my research synthesis useful), and I recently launched a podcast called Signal and Stories with Boris Meinardus, where we dig into the ideas and people shaping the field. If you are working in or around the space and have an interesting career story, we would love to host you!
When I’m not reading papers or arguing with build systems, you’ll find me in the gym working my way back to doing heavy deadlifts. I’m always interested in conversations about retrieval systems, knowledge management, the economics of AI tooling, and what it actually means to build useful things in this strange moment we find ourselves in.
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