Max Hopei is a software engineer, architect, and engineering leader with over 15 years of experience building distributed systems at scale. Throughout his career, he has navigated the complexity of modern software architecture, from high-throughput messaging platforms to resilient microservices and AI-integrated systems. His work spans startups and enterprise environments, where he has led cross-functional teams, established engineering best practices, and guided organizations through complex technical transformations. Max has deep expertise in software architecture, cloud infrastructure, and developer experience, and brings a pragmatic, use-case-oriented mindset to everything he builds. He believes great engineering isn't just about technology—it's about designing systems that are understandable, evolvable, and aligned with the human context in which they operate. As a Principal Engineer at Regiondo, he led the re-platforming of one of the biggest B2B booking systems in Europe, migrating it from a monolithic to a microservices architecture. He learned to be pragmatic and to focus on market needs and systems adaptability. At the Celonis Strategy & Innovation department, he investigates emerging technologies, identifies upcoming trends, and drives the design and development of new business models to build the future of Process Intelligence.

Part 1. The Modern Technology.- Chapter 1. Setting the focus on the right things.- Chapter 2. Revising microservices architecture.- Chapter 3. Message-driven architecture.- Chapter 4. Streaming architecture.- Chapter 5. Agentic architecture.- Chapter 6. A real-world system example.- Chapter 7. Private information retrieval.- Chapter 8. Making your system approachable.- Chapter 9. Observability in unpredictable systems.- Chapter 10. Using AI in your systems.- Part 2. The New Engineer.- Chapter 11. Using AI to build systems.- Chapter 12. From “Code for people” to “Code for AI”.- Chapter 13. A programming language for LLM (by LLM).- Chapter 14. LLM-based compiler and the natural language code.- Chapter 15. A full-stack team for distributed systems.- Part 3. The New Audience.- Chapter 16. Machine-generated traffic.- Chapter 17. Machine-friendly content.- Chapter 18. Machine-friendly protocols.- Chapter 19. Changing expectations towards interfaces.- Chapter 20. Growing complexity of use cases.- Chapter 21. Growing data privacy pressure.- Summary.