Max Welling, born in 1968, is a Dutch computer scientist who works in the field of machine learning at the University of Amsterdam. In August 2017, a company called Scyfer BV, which was started by the university and co-founded by Welling, was bought by Qualcomm. After this, Welling worked as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands. He is also a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science, which is located in Amsterdam.

Welling earned his PhD in physics, with his research focusing on quantum gravity, under the guidance of Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft at Utrecht University in 1998. He has written more than 250 articles reviewed by experts in the areas of machine learning, computer vision, statistics, and physics. He is best known for creating variational autoencoders (VAEs), which he developed together with Diederik P Kingma.

In 2025, Welling was chosen as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.