Fotis Tsokos LV 9 Engineering Team Lead

Bio

Engineering team lead in Berlin with a deep backend background. Before moving into leadership I spent years building backend systems for mobile games, sports betting, e-commerce and news media. At Almedia I now lead a team of engineers, drive decisions on product, architecture and infrastructure, and own the cash-out systems, which have processed over $500M in payments.

My roots are in networks and security: I hold an MSc in Networks & Systems Security, wrote theses on software-defined perimeters and ML-based intrusion detection, and taught the Internet Protocol Suite at university.

Quest history

  1. Engineering Team Lead · Almedia

    Current quest Oct 2023 – Present · Berlin, Germany

    • Joined at fewer than 30 employees and scaled with the company as it became a Berlin unicorn and Europe’s 3rd fastest-growing company, with a $1B+ run rate.
    • Lead a highly capable team of engineers across a range of specialisms.
    • Drive key decisions on product, architecture and infrastructure.
    • Own the cash-out systems end to end: the payment infrastructure behind over $500M in payouts to date.

    Loot TypeScript, NestJS, GraphQL, Socket.io, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Google Cloud

  2. Senior Software Engineer · FYTA

    Nov 2022 – Oct 2023 · Berlin, Germany

    • Built development and deployment tooling that made multiple releases per week the norm.
    • Worked closely with the firmware team to design the communication protocols between the backend and the sensor firmware.
    • Owned several product features end to end, from planning and design through to release.

    Loot MySQL, AWS

  3. Senior Software Engineer (Contract) · Digital Publications Group

    Apr 2022 – Sep 2022 · Thessaloniki, Greece

    • Architected and delivered the company’s largest e-commerce platform to date.
    • Drove the move to a micro-service architecture and integrated it with the existing PHP platform.
    • Designed event-driven Node.js and PostgreSQL services communicating over Redis pub/sub, deployed with Docker and Kubernetes.

    Loot Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, PHP

  4. Senior Backend Developer (Contract) · Big Pixel Studios

    Jul 2019 – Oct 2020 · London, UK

    • Built backend systems for Clone Rumble, the next game from the Adult Swim-owned studio behind Pocket Mortys (10M+ downloads).
    • Raised the team’s engineering bar by introducing automated testing, code formatting and shared coding standards.
    • Improved the in-house server framework and query builder, and built internal modules that sped up feature development across the team.

    Loot Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Python, Docker, Jenkins, Artillery

  5. Backend Developer · Kwiff

    Apr 2018 – May 2019 · London, UK

    • Led backend development of the Sportsbook product for a new betting platform.
    • Expanded the Sportsbook to new sports, including MMA, boxing, and horse and greyhound racing.
    • Refactored legacy services and reduced the whole system’s resource requirements.

    Loot Node.js (JS/TS), MySQL, Python, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins

  6. Backend Developer (Internship) · The World Weekly

    Jun 2017 – Apr 2018 · London, UK

    • Led backend development, initially remotely and then on-site in London.
    • Re-architected the news site’s backend and database in Node.js, improving speed and scalability and cutting hosting costs to one eighth.
    • Built N-Stream, a community platform for shaping the white paper of a news aggregator that filters and validates global news coverage.

    Loot Node.js, MySQL, PHP (CodeIgniter), Python

  7. Full Stack Developer (Internship) · Centaur Analytics

    Jul 2015 – Aug 2015 · Volos, Greece

    • Built DrivePal, an app that tracked driving habits and vehicle emissions, plus several MEAN-stack prototypes in an agile team.

    Loot MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, Node.js

Training

  • MSc Communication Networks & Systems Security

    Aristotle University of Thessaloniki · Sep 2020 – Feb 2022

    Score 9.67 / 10

    • Thesis: Al Pastor, NIDS dataset generation with neural networks

  • MEng Electrical & Computer Engineering

    University of Thessaly · 2012 – 2018

    Score 7.5 / 10

    • Thesis: Development of a Software Defined Perimeter (10 / 10)
    • Ranked 3rd of 150 students in 2016–17

Side quests

Graduate Teaching Fellow · Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Sep 2021 – Jan 2022

Lectured on the Internet Protocol Suite and ran the networks workshop, where students built programming projects and analysed packets in Wireshark.

Loot Java, Wireshark

C & MIPS Assembly Instructor

Taught C programming and MIPS assembly.