# Dimitris Kirtsios — Founder & CTO, Staff-level Software Engineer

> Munich / London-based Founder, CTO, and Staff-level Software Engineer with 8+ years of professional engineering across Munich startups and a Volkswagen-backed scaleup. Currently founder & CTO at LYRASENSE, an agentic AI platform for satellite intelligence backed by the European Space Agency and Seraphim Space. Previously a Tech Lead at Elli (Volkswagen Group), one of the core contributors behind what is today Europe's largest EV charging network (1M+ stations).

Website: https://dimkirt.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dimkirt
GitHub: https://github.com/dimkirt
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dimkirt

## Snapshot

- 8+ years of professional engineering, 15+ years coding overall.
- Strongest cards: cloud / infrastructure and backend engineering, paired with a strong customer-facing track record (user-research interviews, technical demos, FDE-style work on enterprise sales).
- EWOR Fellow (0.1% acceptance, backed by unicorn founders of SumUp, Adjust, ProGlove).
- Antler VC Entrepreneur in Residence (top 1% of applicants).
- Speaker at BigTechDay 2021 and The Pool startup community.
- Two-time promotion at Elli: Software Engineer → Senior Engineer → Staff Engineer.

## Current Role: Founder & CTO at LYRASENSE

- Period: April 2024 – Present (London/Munich, Remote).
- Co-founded with Nader Labib.
- Backed by the European Space Agency and Seraphim Space.
- The platform targets enterprise and government operators in energy, mining, and defence.
- Pilot customers include Aramco and Telefónica; design partners include Rio Tinto and the UN World Food Programme.
- LYRASENSE website: https://lyrasense.com
- LYRASENSE app: https://app.lyrasense.com

### What I built at LYRASENSE

- Took the product from zero to live 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.
- Drove FDE-style work 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.

### LYRASENSE tech stack

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

## Career Timeline

### Entrepreneur in Residence & Co-Founder at Antler VC

- Period: 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, developed the technical and product roadmap, and shipped two prototypes end-to-end as the technical co-founder, pivoting the concept twice based on user feedback.

### Tech Lead at Volkswagen Group Charging GmbH (Elli)

- Period: March 2023 – September 2023 (7 mos), Munich, DE.
- Reduced technical debt from 85 to 30 tasks (~65%) while shipping product, by systematically promoting pair & ensemble programming.
- Drove the extraction of a domain from the monolith into a separate service to transfer ownership and reduce cognitive load on the team.
- Part of a task force responsible for transitioning Elli to event-driven architectures; developed the infrastructure and architecture for a central event broker, with clear guidelines and robust failover mechanisms.
- Member of the Incident Response Team since day one of the on-call rotation; 3,000+ hours of on-call experience across the full Elli tenure.

### Senior Software Engineer at Volkswagen Group Charging GmbH (Elli)

- Period: January 2022 – March 2023 (1 yr 3 mos), Munich, DE.
- Led 18 cross-departmental event-storming workshops during the Elli 2.0 transformation, surfacing 43 actionable improvements; publicly recognized by stakeholders for improving alignment.
- Owned Operational Security and Incident Response topics; passed the internal ISO/IEC 27001 audit while resolving 20+ process and infrastructure issues; subsequently represented Software Engineering in the external ISO/IEC 27001 audit.
- Defined the architecture for the MSP 2.0 product, enabling the responsible team to hit business deadlines while phasing out third-party hubs and reducing tech debt.
- Drove engineering hiring through tender and interview loops to grow the team.

### Software Engineer at Volkswagen Group Charging GmbH (Elli)

- Period: May 2020 – January 2022 (1 yr 9 mos), Munich, DE.
- Shipped core features of Elli's Mobility Service Provider product and integrated with external roaming hubs and charging platforms, opening new revenue streams.
- Set up production-grade alerting and monitoring across all backend services in PagerDuty and GCP via Terraform, in place before the company's first high-stakes go-live.
- Co-organized GameDays for 51 backend engineers (54 simulated incidents over two days), uncovered and addressed 59 process/infrastructure action items, and presented the program at BigTechDay 2021 ("Game Days @ Elli: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and to Love Incidents").
- Founded and led the internal Service Management Community of Practice.

### Software Engineer at ThinxNet GmbH (ryd)

- Period: 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 services in our new setup.
- Integrated internationalization into the backend, preparing the platform for European market expansion.

### Backend Engineer at blik GmbH

- Period: December 2018 – May 2019 (6 mos), Munich, DE.
- Designed and implemented a REST API that served warehouse KPIs.
- Migrated the Kubernetes cluster from bare metal to AWS EKS via Terraform after a significant outage.
- Designed and implemented a PoC for device management, employing Domain Driven Design.

### Software Engineering Intern at blik GmbH

- Period: May 2018 – October 2018 (6 mos), Munich, DE.
- Developed a discrete-event network simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks in Python; deployed on AWS for team-wide use.

### Software Engineer at Digital Product School (UnternehmerTUM)

- Period: January 2018 – March 2018 (3 mos), Munich, DE.
- Cross-functional product team on a ride-sharing prototype.

### Web Developer at Aristotle Racing Team (ART)

- Period: November 2015 – January 2018, Thessaloniki, GR.
- Improved website availability from 92% to 99.7% via synthetic monitoring; managed the WordPress site.

### Software Engineer at Pandora Robotics Team, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

- Period: December 2014 – November 2015, Thessaloniki, GR.
- 2nd place, Autonomy Class, RoboCup Rescue 2015 (Hefei, China).
- Refined the autonomous UGV navigation: exploration algorithms for obstacle distinction, local-planner tuning, recovery behaviors, and integration testing for Navigation, Exploration, and Data Fusion modules.

## Education

- MSc, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
- 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, PostHog.
- 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.

## Speaking & Recognition

- BigTechDay 2021: "Game Days @ Elli: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and to Love Incidents." Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpqE_dvrWoM
- The Pool (startup community): "Five Things That Will Give You An Unfair Competitive Advantage."
- EWOR Fellow (0.1% acceptance), backed by the founders of SumUp, Adjust, and ProGlove.
- Antler VC Entrepreneur in Residence (top 1%).

## Articles

Long-form writing on https://dimkirt.com/articles, including:
- AI Coding: Rediscovering the Magic
- Game Days and Incident Management
- Five Things That Will Give You An Unfair Competitive Advantage
- Why Estimates Are Useless
- Amor Fati: No Regrets

## Languages

- Greek (native).
- English (professional working proficiency).
- German (basic communication skills).

## Contact

- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dimkirt
- GitHub: https://github.com/dimkirt
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/dimkirt
- Personal site: https://dimkirt.com