Alumni Portrait: Maxwell Coleman Th '18

Mar 02, 2026 | by Theresa D'Orsi | Dartmouth Engineer

Migration Architect

As an architect specializing in cloud infrastructure at San Jose, Calif.-based NetApp, Coleman leads complex, big-data migrations. He works with clients such as Epic Games, Nike, Netflix Animation Studios, and Atlassian to deliver large-scale system optimization— including a massive effort he compares to a "fully remote ENGS 89/90 project—except at production scale with millions of dollars and zero downtime requirements on the line."

Coleman, shown here summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in 2025, led a team across four continents for a recent system migration.

"We were implementing real-time data replication across separate global regions … building the solution as we went."

Maxwell Coleman Th'18

Can you share an example of your work?

The highlight has been architecting a migration for Atlassian’s Bitbucket application, moving 2.3 petabytes (think 2 million HD movies) of production data plus 2.3 petabytes for disaster recovery to general purpose file systems with essentially no downtime (about 60 seconds total) while thousands of software engineers around the world continued using the platform. The technical challenge was substantial: We were implementing real-time data replication across separate global regions with essentially no documentation, building the solution as we went. But the hardest part wasn’t the migration itself; it was what came before. We built an Ocean’s 11-style mock architecture in house to stress test multithreaded loads, simulating thousands of engineers accessing the same data blocks in parallel. That testing consumed massive internal resources but gave us the confidence that 60 seconds of downtime was actually achievable. Coleman, shown here summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in 2025, led a team across four continents for a recent system migration.

How did you pull it off?

During those nine months, I led an interdisciplinary team across four continents, including subject matter experts in data residency, performance optimization, architecture design, cost optimization, security, and networking, syncing with teams early in the morning (West Coast time) in Amsterdam and troubleshooting late into the night with colleagues in Australia. Success came from approaching cloud infrastructure as a systems design problem. It’s not about raw capacity—it’s about designing for resilience and operational simplicity from day one. Automation became a hard requirement not just an efficiency gain. It was a surreal moment watching petabytes migrate with only 60 seconds of downtime— and delivering $2.1 million in annual cost savings and 17-percent reduction in application latency (as the software engineers became more productive).

How has Thayer influenced your path?

The Dartmouth connection runs deep for me. I got my job at Net-App through a connection I made on the first Thayer Silicon Valley Career Trek. Since then, I’ve hosted Thayer students at our Silicon Valley campus twice to pay it forward. Seeing their eyes light up about tech possibilities has been incredibly gratifying.

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