Key Achievements
AI & Delivery
AI-Driven Delivery Transformation
1 year · 5 engineers
Led year-long adoption of Cursor AI & GitHub Copilot — redesigned ticket definition, test case standards, and PR review practices around AI-assisted development, significantly reducing code production time.
Impact
Product Pipeline TAT
24 hours → 1 hour average
Led 4-team initiative cutting product publishing time from 24h to 1h — directly accelerating supplier revenue and time-to-sale for Wayfair.
Impact
White Labelling Rearchitecture
4 hours → <1 hour (P95)
Complete service rearchitecture enabling parallelisation — same direct revenue impact as the pipeline project, with a measurable P95 batch time improvement.
Cost
GCP Cost Optimisation
40% cloud spend reduction
Database redesign, rationalised data capture, elimination of unused infrastructure, and focused reporting exports — balancing cost reduction with active roadmap commitments.
People
PHP → Java Transition
5 engineers · 6 months · zero disruption
Designed the learning curriculum and learned alongside the team — all 5 engineers writing robust, well-tested Java within 6 months with no roadmap impact.
Execution
GitLab Codeowners Rollout
4,000 developers · overnight · zero regressions
Two-person team rolled out a custom Codeowners implementation to 4,000 developers overnight — a high-stakes execution where failure would have blocked all commits company-wide.
People
3 Mid → Senior Promotions
During Wayfair tenure
Grew three engineers from mid to senior level through personalised development plans, weekly 1-1s, and consistent mentorship — validated through calibration with senior leadership.
Also Worth Knowing
Operational Excellence
Tiered Service Ownership
2-year programme · 2 out-of-hours pages
Built a tiered service ownership model from scratch — classified services by failure impact, defined response standards per tier, and embedded structured incident practices (SLOs, error budgets, blameless postmortems). Result: a healthy on-call culture with only 2 out-of-hours pages in 2 years.
Architecture
SOA Rearchitecture Programme
Generated a 3-year engineering roadmap
Led migration of multiple applications from PHP monorepo to service-oriented architecture — used each migration as an opportunity to optimise functionality and reduce TAT. The rearchitecture became the strategic foundation for a 3-year engineering roadmap.
Culture
Team Canvas Framework
Adopted as Wayfair-wide best practice
Designed, documented, and evangelised a Team Canvas workshop helping teams build a charter around roles, goals, and ways of working. Presented at engineering meetings, wrote adoption documentation, led sessions across departments — contributed directly to promotion.
Culture
Psychological Safety Workshops
Designed from scratch
Designed and facilitated workshops on psychological safety and unconscious bias — developed original material with manager mentorship, strengthening interpersonal relationships and team cohesion.
Experience
Senior Engineering Manager
Led engineering teams of up to 9 across Berlin, Boston, and India. Owned OKR definition, roadmap planning, architectural direction, and people development. Managed an Engineering Manager directly.
Team & Delivery
- Managed engineering teams of up to 9 engineers across a global, multi-timezone environment (Berlin, Boston, India), ensuring sprint ceremonies and collaboration were inclusive of all locations.
- Managed and mentored an Engineering Manager, overseeing performance, execution quality, and a full domain knowledge transfer and handover with zero regressions.
- Collaborated closely with the Director of Engineering to design execution plans with alternatives for parallelising work, accelerating delivery timelines, and unlocking future roadmap items.
- Authored budget extension proposals presenting trade-offs between engineer headcount and seniority levels, with short- and long-term utilisation plans.
- Led GCP cost optimization initiative, responding to a mandate to cut cloud spend by 40% with multiple concrete proposals that balanced cost reduction with active roadmap commitments.
- Owned OKR definition and monitoring across the domain, ensuring team execution was directly tied to company-wide engineering objectives.
- Created and drove roadmaps not only for own teams but also for adjacent teams within the domain; frequently negotiated inclusion and prioritisation of items by quantifying business benefit — sometimes offering to lend engineers to unblock delivery.
Architecture & Technical Direction
- Served as a trusted domain expert frequently consulted on new product designs and technical proposals across Wayfair, validating hypotheses, surfacing risks, and verifying architectural decisions.
- Worked closely with multiple Engineering Leads across the company due to the team's role in orchestrating mutations on product data and consuming services from various domains.
- Led the rearchitecture of multiple applications from the PHP monorepo to SOA, using the migration as an opportunity to optimise functionality, improve stability, and reduce TAT.
- Enabled the team to transition from PHP to Java with no disruption to roadmap delivery: set quality standards, performed code reviews, and curated a learning curriculum; within 6 months, all team members were writing robust, well-tested Java code.
- Championed the adoption of AI-assisted development tools (Cursor AI, GitHub Copilot) — evaluated options, integrated into engineering workflows, and defined guidelines for effective use; actively upskilling in Claude Code to further drive AI-augmented development practices.
People Development
- Worked individually with each direct report to define a personalised growth plan with clear targets and expectations, reviewed in weekly 1-1s; growth consistently validated through performance review results.
- Participated in calibration meetings with senior leadership, presenting and defending performance ratings and promotion cases; achieved 3 promotions to the next level during tenure.
- Consistently mentored junior engineers through Wayfair's mentorship programme, providing guidance on technical skills, career development, and soft skills.
Culture & Team Health
- Introduced the Team Canvas Framework — a structured workshop helping teams build a charter around roles, goals, purpose, and ways of working. Adopted as a Wayfair-wide best practice; led multiple sessions across different teams.
- Led workshops on psychological safety and unconscious biases, designed from scratch with manager mentorship.
- Monitored team health continuously using the Spotify Squad Health Framework, identifying opportunities for improvement and leading cross-EM sessions to compare results and surface broader trends.
- Guided teams through multiple rounds of layoffs, frequent changes in scope and domain ownership, and shifts in engineering priorities — keeping the team connected to the bigger picture and focusing on skill growth as a constant.
Engineering Manager
Led cross-team projects across 4 engineering teams. Institutionalised core engineering processes including structured delivery and technical decision-making. Drove architectural transformation and GCP migration.
- Led the major project across 4 engineering teams — defining product specifications, setting architectural and code quality standards, running weekly standups, and unblocking dependencies — resulting in a reduction of the product addition pipeline TAT from 24 hours to a minimum of 1 hour and an average TAT improvement of 50%.
- Delivered a complete rearchitecture of the White Labelling solution to a Service-Level Architecture enabling parallelisation, reducing batch execution time from 4 hours to under 1 hour (P95).
- Delivered a custom Codeowners implementation for Wayfair's GitLab (2019), inspired by GitHub Codeowners, rolled out overnight to 4,000 developers with zero regressions — a foundational step in defining monorepo ownership before the SOA migration.
- Led the migration of multiple application toolbases to GCP.
- Managed multiple domain takeovers and handovers, ensuring smooth continuity of functionality without regressions in each case.
- Defined and institutionalised two core engineering processes: (1) a weekly Tech Meeting for team-driven technical decision-making, and (2) a structured project delivery process — owner briefing, technical proposal with architecture/monitoring/metrics/test cases, team review, decision meeting, then ticket creation.
Senior Software Engineer
Led deduplication and automated QA projects. Early contributor to architectural transformation toward SOA. Mentored junior colleagues in Agile/Scrum environment.
- Led end-to-end design and delivery of engineering projects that streamlined Deduplication and automated quality assurance of products.
- Participated in early phases of the architectural transformation toward a service-oriented architecture.
- Collaborated in Agile/Scrum teams, taking ownership of technical delivery and mentoring junior colleagues.
Senior Developer
Full-stack development across e-commerce and marketplace platforms. Delivered payments APIs, mobile websites, and code refactoring projects across PHP frameworks.
Nu3 GmbH · Feb 2014 – Aug 2015 · Berlin
- Delivered code refactoring projects implementing design patterns across Zend & Yii Frameworks.
- Built internal applications and new website components; worked with MySQL, Propel, Memcached, Redis, Solr, and Git in an Agile/Scrum environment.
Sparheld International GmbH · Apr 2013 – Jan 2014 · Berlin
- Full-stack development using Zend Framework, MongoDB, SASS, jQuery, HTML5.
- Implemented the company's mobile website and new site components.
PeoplePerHour.com · Jun 2011 – Mar 2013 · Athens, Greece
- Implemented the Payments API and Payments Section for the new website (launched July 2012), One-Click payments, and Envoy Payment Gateway integration.
- Led legacy code refactoring to OO PHP (Yii Framework), database refactoring and migrations; worked in an Agile/Scrum team using Git.
Skills & Tools
Leadership
- Engineering Strategy
- People Development
- OKRs & Roadmap Planning
- Distributed Team Management
- Technical Hiring
- Budget Planning
AI & Tooling
- Cursor AI
- GitHub Copilot
- Claude Code (active)
- Operational Excellence
- SLOs & Error Budgets
- Incident Response
Technology
- GCP · Kubernetes · Kafka
- Java (Spring Boot) · PHP
- PostgreSQL · Redis · MySQL
- GitHub · GitLab · Jira
- React · JavaScript
- Greek · English · German (B1)