Maxime Claux joined ELCA in 2010 as a Cloud Engineer in a team of four. Today at 40, he is VP Product & Strategy at EveryWare / ELCA Cloud Services. Over sixteen years, he has lived through the industry's biggest technological shifts from the early days of DevOps to sovereign artificial intelligence, leading landmark projects for major clients across sport, luxury and the public sector.
We sat down with Maxime to reflect on his journey at ELCA, the projects that shaped him, the lessons he carries, and what he believes it takes to grow in a company like this one.
How did your journey at ELCA begin and what made you join the company?
A headhunter reached out to me in 2010. What caught my attention straight away was that ELCA was already a genuine tech pioneer in Switzerland, covering a broad range of technologies and disciplines. When you're a young engineer just out of school, that's exactly what you're looking for: a place where the work is technically ambitious and nothing is set in stone yet.
I was joining what would eventually grow into what we now call “Cloud” and “DevOps”. The big cloud platforms had barely gotten off the ground, the whole industry was just finding its feet. So we really were among the first. It was a tiny team and there was a clear sense that we were building something from scratch. That kind of blank-page energy is hard to resist.
What did that first role actually involve?
In today's language, you'd call it DevOps Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer. I was responsible for the cloud infrastructure of SECUTIX. The company was very much in start-up mode, the divide between platform and development teams was still very real. What made my profile useful was that I already had a foot in both camps: I understood development and infrastructure, which was exactly what SECUTIX needed to start breaking down those walls.
"There was a blank page in front of us, and something real to build. That's what drives you when you're starting out."
Looking back, what were the moments that really shaped your career?
The first major one was a project for a large international sports federation. We won the contract in 2013 to build and deploy their ticketing platform for a major tournament in 2016. I led the technical team handling the infrastructure. We spent three years getting it right, and when the moment came, I was on the ground in Paris at the operations centre, making sure nothing went wrong on the day. That kind of high-stakes, real-time pressure teaches you things no classroom ever could.
Then there was a project for a prestigious luxury watchmaking group. I was involved from the commercial side all the way through to delivery, building the proposal, winning the deal, assembling the team, and running the platform over several years. End-to-end ownership like that is genuinely formative.
And then there’s the one I’m probably most proud of, a major public-sector project that turned out to be the most consequential of my career.
Tell us about that project. How did it all unfold?
The tender had two lots: software development, and cloud hosting. The natural assumption within ELCA Engineering was to partner with a large external provider for the hosting side, cleaner, simpler, less risk.
I pushed back hard. My position was clear: if we don't host this project ourselves, ELCA Cloud Services has no reason to exist. I escalated directly to senior leadership, made my case, and they backed me. The outcome? We lost the software development lot but we won the hosting. This was the single largest contract in the Group's entire history.
To me, that story captures something important: if you believe in something and you're willing to fight for it, you can change the outcome ,even when everyone else is pointing in a different direction.
"We lost the software development lot but we won the hosting. The biggest contract in the Group's history."
You came in as an engineer and ended up as VP Product & Strategy. How did that shift actually happen?
Gradually, and honestly quite organically. You start as an engineer, you become the person people come to for a specific technology, then the projects grow and you simply can't carry it all alone anymore. So you start bringing people in, coaching them, building a team around you.
The next step came when I added a commercial dimension on top of the technical one, getting involved in proposals, client relationships, understanding the market. Once you can connect those two worlds and build a coherent vision out of them, your leadership takes on a different scale.
I'll also be honest: there were times when I took on the responsibilities of a role well before the title or the pay caught up. Acting as a leader without the official stamp, if you like. But it always got recognised in the end, and I stand by every one of those moments. In a company of 2,200 people, you can't expect every contribution to be instantly visible. Sometimes you have to be patient and trust the process.
Was ELCA actively developing you, or were you mostly carving your own path?
Honestly, both and I think that's the honest answer for anyone who's grown quickly in a company. You have to consistently deliver and take initiative. When you do, good managers notice and give you more to work with. That dynamic is real.
But I also created a lot of my own momentum through the projects I drove, the sovereign cloud strategy I pushed for, and bets that weren't obvious at the time. The fact that I'm now invited by media to talk about sovereign cloud is the result of a conviction I had nearly ten years ago. Vision has to come from within.
That's something I've been very deliberate about with the people around me. One team member joined as an intern and is now a Lead Manager. That trajectory is real and it's repeatable. It just takes the right mix of ambition and consistency.
Sixteen years is a long time, especially in tech. What's kept you here?
New challenges. Every three or four years, something genuinely different came along: a new role, a new strategic direction, a new technology to get my teeth into. Sometimes it was formalised; sometimes I just stepped into it before anyone asked. But the work never went stale, and that matters enormously.
There's also something about ELCA's DNA that I think is genuinely rare. We're an independent tech company. Our technology choices are driven by what's genuinely right for the client, not by commercial agreements with vendors. We figure out what's actually right for the client and go from there. That kind of intellectual freedom is what makes sustained innovation possible and I think it's a big part of why clients have stayed loyal to us over the years.
How would you describe the culture for younger talent? Is it as open as it sounds?
Engineers here get real autonomy from day one. And as your track record grows, so does the trust placed in you. It becomes self-reinforcing.
Here's what I tell people: show up with something you built on your own time, and people will notice. A certification nobody asked for, a proof of concept you put together. We reward initiative, full stop.
More broadly, there's a strong entrepreneurial culture here. An idea doesn't need to go through six layers of approval before it can be tested. You can sketch something out over coffee, get five people in a room, get a quick nod from leadership, and start building. That speed of execution ,from concept to live product is something I genuinely don't think you find everywhere.
"Every three or four years, something genuinely new came along. The work never went stale."
What would you say to a young person who's just joined ELCA and thinks they'll be waiting years before anyone hands them real responsibility?
I'd tell them that's a misconception and I can back that up with my own story. It's usually the first thing I say when someone raises that concern.
To be fair, context matters. When I arrived, the company was smaller and less structured, and growth was faster that naturally creates more room for people to step up. Things work a bit differently today. But what hasn't changed is this: if you bring initiative and a willingness to take on the hard stuff, you still rise quickly. The ladder exists, it just isn't fixed.
And there's something worth noting: today's joiners have access to things I never had, a more structured career framework, leaders who are more intentional about development. The conditions are better than they were. What remains unchanged is the basic equation: you get out what you put in.