Experience

When Max and his team became involved, SCADA development at Tesla was largely fragmented across the different manufacturing shops. Body, General Assembly, Seats, Press, and other areas had developed their own approaches, often with different people creating and maintaining their own systems. There was no common SCADA development standard or central platform strategy, and many of the existing systems relied heavily on custom background Python code that was difficult to understand, poorly documented, and potentially difficult to maintain over time.

Max was the primary architect behind the effort to change that. He and his team worked directly with production leadership across the various manufacturing organizations to understand what the factories actually needed from SCADA. From there, they developed standards, reusable code, and a common platform approach that allowed systems to be deployed much more rapidly and consistently instead of being reinvented for each manufacturing area.

One of Max’s particular strengths was his ability to bridge the needs of production and controls engineering with the requirements of Tesla’s internal IT organization. That is not always an easy boundary to work across, especially in a fast-moving manufacturing environment, but Max understood both sides well enough to help create a solution that was practical on the factory floor while also being scalable and supportable from an enterprise systems perspective.

The result was much more than a standardized solution for a single factory. The platform and development approach ultimately supported SCADA deployments in both Austin and Berlin, across different manufacturing departments and in different languages. The work significantly reduced dependence on the older custom Python-based solutions and created a much more scalable foundation for SCADA development across Tesla.

Max also provided leadership well beyond simply designing the architecture. Although the other engineers on the team were not his direct reports, he effectively led the technical work, helped develop and mentor younger engineers, and created direction for a small team that had a very large responsibility. He was also willing to go where the work required, traveling frequently from his home factory in Berlin to Austin to support development and deployment. Throughout that work, I found Max to be technically strong, dedicated, and consistently professional, including in difficult or high-pressure situations.

I would bring Max in again for any company building a new factory that needed to establish a scalable SCADA platform capable of supporting multiple manufacturing departments. In fact, when I later considered joining another company that was preparing to build new battery factories and had not yet established a SCADA strategy, Max was one of the first people I thought of bringing in to help build that capability from the ground up. That probably says more about my confidence in his abilities than any recommendation I could write.