Dimitris Kirtsios

Founder & CTO · Staff Engineer · Munich, Germany

Summary

Founder, CTO, and Staff-level Software Engineer with 15+ years of programming experience and 8+ years of professional engineering across Munich startups and a Volkswagen-backed scaleup. Currently building LYRASENSE, an agentic AI platform for geospatial intelligence, taken from zero to live and already serving one of the largest energy companies in Saudi Arabia. Previously a Staff Engineer / Tech Lead at Elli (Volkswagen Group), where I helped build the backend of what is today Europe’s largest EV charging network (1M+ stations). Selected as an EWOR Fellow (0.1% acceptance) and an Antler VC Entrepreneur in Residence (top 1%).

I work best in cross-functional, empowered product teams where boring tech, high engineering standards, and customer obsession compound into speed.

Experience

Founder & CTO at LYRASENSE

April 2024 – Present · London/Munich, Remote

LYRASENSE is an agentic AI platform for satellite intelligence, backed by the European Space Agency and Seraphim Space. The platform targets enterprise and government operators in energy, mining, and defence, with pilot customers including Aramco and Telefónica, and design partners such as Rio Tinto and the UN World Food Programme. Co-founded with Nader Labib.

• Took the product from zero to live (app.lyrasense.com) as founding CTO: ran user-research interviews with hundreds of geospatial experts across energy, mining, agriculture, and commodities, then designed and shipped the MVP end-to-end into production.
• Designed and built the agentic harness that lets LLM-driven agents perform real geospatial analysis end-to-end: tool/function calling over Earth Engine and internal data services, structured planning loops, long-running task orchestration, and guardrails for reproducible, auditable outputs.
• Implemented a RAG pipeline over geospatial documentation, customer data layers, and internal knowledge to ground agent answers and reduce hallucinations on domain-specific queries.
• Built a cloud-native serverless notebook environment where agents and users can write and execute code on demand: on-the-fly VM provisioning of different sizes, isolated per-user runtimes, and a cloud-backed storage layer that mounts as a native filesystem so notebooks, datasets, and agent artifacts are seamlessly shared between humans and agents.
• Implemented the full web application end-to-end (multi-tenant React/TypeScript frontend, Node.js/FastAPI services, Clerk for auth, Supabase for data, infrastructure-as-code on GCP/AWS, and CI/CD), with the agent runtime, notebook compute, and mapping/visualization layers wired into a single product surface.
• Authored and shipped the internal lyrasense Python SDK (v1.0.0), including a 3,700+ LOC interactive mapping module with Google Earth Engine integration, split-view comparisons, heatmaps, and a notebook-native ECharts SDK.
• Established engineering foundations from day one: trunk-based development, CI/CD with automated quality gates and AI-assisted code review, infrastructure-as-code for every environment, and product analytics with PostHog to support a product-led growth motion.
• Acted as a Forward-Deployed Engineer on critical sales cycles: delivered technical demos, built bespoke monitoring solutions for prospective customers, and provided the technical input that helped close enterprise contracts.
• Owned engineering and product foundations: defined the tech stack, made buy-vs-build decisions, procured and managed IT tooling, and represented the company in technical due diligence with investors.
• Hired and managed three freelancers to extend the MVP.

Tech Stack: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, FastAPI, Agno, PostgreSQL (Supabase), Clerk, Terraform, GCP, AWS Bedrock, Google Earth Engine, OpenAI/Anthropic agent tooling.

Entrepreneur in Residence & Co-Founder at Antler VC

January 2024 – April 2024 · Berlin/Munich, DE

Selected into Antler’s European cohort (top 1% of applicants). Co-founded a venture out of Antler that consolidated into what became LYRASENSE.

• Found a co-founder, validated multiple problem spaces with prospective customers, and developed the technical and product roadmap for the venture.
• Designed product concept and technical architecture; built and shipped two prototypes end-to-end as the technical co-founder, pivoting the concept twice based on user feedback.
• Ran customer-discovery interviews and translated insights into product decisions and pivots.

Tech Lead at Volkswagen Group Charging GmbH (Elli)

March 2023 – September 2023 (7 mos) · Munich, DE

• As the Tech Lead of a development team, I reduced technical debt from 85 to 30 tasks. Moreover, increased team productivity and reduced knowledge silos by systematically promoting pair & ensemble programming.
• Drove the efforts of extracting a domain from our monolith to a separate service in order to transfer ownership and reduce the cognitive load on our team.
• As part of a task force responsible for transitioning Elli to event-driven architectures, I developed the infrastructure and architecture for a central event broker setup, fortified with clear guidelines and robust failover mechanisms.
• In my 3.5 years in Elli, I protected our SLAs by being an integral part of the Incident Response Team since day one, amassing over 3,000 hours of on-call experience, and effectively managing incidents on critical infrastructure.

Tech Stack: TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, GCP, PostgreSQL, Docker, Terraform, PagerDuty.

Sr. Software Engineer at Volkswagen Group Charging GmbH (Elli)

January 2022 – March 2023 (1 yr 3 mos) · Munich, DE

• During the Elli 2.0 transformation, I led 18 event-storming workshops involving multiple departments, uncovering 43 points for improvement and fostering synergies across departments. This initiative was highly praised by stakeholders for improving alignment among departments and addressing key issues.
• Took responsibility for Operational Security and Incident Response topics and successfully passed the internal ISO 27001 audit while identifying and resolving more than 20 process and infrastructure issues. Subsequently, I represented Software Engineering in the following successful external ISO 27001 audit.
• Defined the architecture for the MSP 2.0 product, and enabled the responsible team to meet business goals on time and reduce technical debt by phasing out third-party hubs.
• Fostered the growth of the engineering staff by actively participating in the hiring and tender processes, and conducting technical interviews to identify and onboard top talent.

Tech Stack: TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, GCP, PostgreSQL, Docker, Terraform, PagerDuty.

Software Engineer at Volkswagen Group Charging GmbH (Elli)

May 2020 – January 2022 (1 yr 9 mos) · Munich, DE

• Contributed to the development of our Mobility Service Provider product, enhancing its features and expanding its user base. Additionally, helped open new revenue streams by integrating with hubs and other charging platforms.
• Improved infrastructure and operations by uncovering and addressing 59 action items while organizing GameDays for 51 engineers. Additionally, I presented on the subject at the BigTechDay 2021 conference.
• Prior to our high-stakes first go-live, I established alerting and monitoring for all backend services using Terraform in PagerDuty and GCP.
• Championed continuous improvement of reliability and operational excellence in Engineering by leading the Service Management Community of Practice (CoP).

Tech Stack: TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, GCP, PostgreSQL, Docker, Terraform, PagerDuty.

Software Engineer at ThinxNet GmbH

May 2019 – March 2020 (11 mos) · Munich, DE

• Drove the transition from a monolithic app to an event-driven microservices architecture by creating an order management service PoC.
• Contributed to a driving score feature by merging data from two different services in our new setup.
• Integrated internationalization into our backend, preparing us for a launch in additional European markets.

Skills: Software Development, Solution Architecture, Relational Databases.

Tech Stack: JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL.

Back End Engineer at blik GmbH

December 2018 – May 2019 (6 mos) · Munich, DE

• Promoted transparency on the performance of logistics processes in our users’ warehouses by designing and implementing a REST API that served warehouse KPIs.
• Following a significant outage, I enhanced the reliability of our Kubernetes cluster and its infrastructure transparency, by transitioning it from bare metal to AWS EKS using Terraform.
• Designed and implemented a PoC for device management, employing Domain Driven Design to align business terminology with our code.

Skills: Software Development, Cloud Computing, Domain Driven Design, Infrastructure as Code.

Tech Stack: Python, Flask, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, Terraform.

Software Engineering Intern at blik GmbH

May 2018 – October 2018 (6 mos) · Munich, DE

Developed a discrete-event network simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks using Python and, revealed insights into the Medium Access Control algorithms and their node support capacities. Deployed this tool on AWS, allowing cloud-based simulations accessible to the entire team.

Tech Stack: Python, AWS, Terraform.

Skills: Software Development, Solution Architecture, Cloud Computing.

Software Engineer at Digital Product School (UnternehmerTUM)

January 2018 – March 2018 (3 mos) · Munich, DE

Member of a cross-functional product team working on a ride-sharing product. Over the course of 3 months, I contributed to ideation, market analysis, and user interviews. In the final month, I lead the creation of our prototype that demonstrated the product’s potential.

Tech Stack: Node.js, Python, Flask, React Native.

Web Developer at Aristotle Racing Team (ART)

November 2015 – January 2018 (2 yrs 3 mos) · Thessaloniki, GR

Enhanced website availability from 92% to 99.7% through synthetic monitoring. Improved the site’s visuals with CSS customizations. Managed the website on WordPress CMS, ensuring consistent performance, security, and easy content updates.

Tech Stack: HTML/CSS, WordPress.

Software Engineer at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

December 2014 – November 2015 (1 yr) · Thessaloniki, GR

• Augmented the autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) navigation capabilities by refining the exploration algorithm to distinguish various obstacle classes, enabling smarter decision-making and increased map coverage.
• Improved the UGV’s ability to navigate complex terrain and free itself from obstacles by fine-tuning the local planner and incorporating recovery behaviors into the navigation algorithm.
• Played a pivotal role in ensuring seamless system performance by leading integration testing for the Navigation, Exploration, and Data Fusion modules, as well as sharing responsibility for System Testing of the autonomous UGV.

Tech Stack: Python, C++, Robot Operating System (ROS).

Skills: Software Development, Technical Leadership.

Education

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH)

Master’s Degree, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Diploma Thesis: Chronos: A simulation tool for Industrial WSN Design and Deployment.

Technical Skills

• Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, C++ (academic).
• Backend: Node.js, NestJS, Express, FastAPI.
• Frontend: React, Vite (working knowledge for full-stack delivery).
• Data: PostgreSQL, Supabase, MongoDB, Firestore, Redis.
• Messaging: GCP Pub/Sub, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ.
• Cloud: GCP, AWS.
• Infra & DevEx: Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Linear, Kubernetes, Helm.
• Observability: PagerDuty, GCP Stackdriver / Cloud Operations.
• AI / Agents: Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral & Gemini APIs, Agno (agent framework), LLM-based agent design, prompt engineering, AI-assisted dev workflows (Claude Code, CodeRabbit).
• Geospatial: Google Earth Engine, satellite/EO data pipelines, interactive mapping.
• Domains: EV charging (OCPI, OICP), eMobility, ISO/IEC 27001, geospatial intelligence.
• Practices: Solution architecture, Domain-Driven Design, event-driven architecture, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, trunk-based development, TDD, pair & ensemble programming, incident response, technical leadership, public speaking.

Languages

Greek (native) · English (professional) · German (basic).