Maxwell Conrad

Background

About Maxwell Conrad

Marine Corps veteran and cybersecurity student currently interning at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer. During the academic year, I support IT operations at Stetson University while completing my degree in cybersecurity and computer science. I develop secure, scalable systems with real-world application. My interests include backend architecture, cloud-native infrastructure, and integrating AI into tools that improve capability and efficiency. I focus on performance, clean deployment, and practical security. Recent work includes- ForgePrep: a full-stack AI study platform deployed on AWS, featuring JWT authentication, real-time WebSocket messaging, GPT-powered quiz generation, and an AWS EC2 FastAPI backend running in a custom VPC with managed PostgreSQL RDS- Stetson Alumni Portal: developed from the ground up with secure cookie-based authentication, role-based access control, admin approval workflows, and integrated user messaging. MongoDB, Express, React- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): implemented GPT-based Q&A using chunked documents, embedding models, and vector search to return context-aware responses. Currently working across backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and applied AI. Always open to connecting on meaningful, technically challenging projects.