Dimitris Kirtsios

Founder & CTO · Staff Engineer · Munich, Germany / London, UK

dimkirt.com · github.com/dimkirt · linkedin.com/in/dimkirt

Summary

Founder, CTO, and Staff-level Software Engineer with 8+ years of professional engineering experience across Munich startups and a Volkswagen-backed scaleup. At LYRASENSE (founder & CTO), built an agentic AI platform for geospatial intelligence and took it from zero to live with pilot customers including Aramco and Telefónica. Earlier, Tech Lead at Elli (Volkswagen Group), one of the core contributors behind what is today Europe’s largest EV charging network (1M+ stations). EWOR Fellow (0.1% acceptance) and Antler VC EIR (top 1%). Strongest cards: cloud/infrastructure and backend engineering, paired with strong customer-facing muscle (UX interviews, technical demos, and FDE-style work on enterprise sales). Comfortable end-to-end.

Experience

Founder & CTO at LYRASENSE

April 2024 – Present · Munich/London, Remote

Agentic AI platform for satellite intelligence, backed by the European Space Agency and Seraphim Space. Pilot customers include Aramco and Telefónica; design partners include Rio Tinto and the UN World Food Programme. Co-founded with Nader Labib.

• Took the product from zero to live as founding CTO; ran user research with hundreds of geospatial experts across energy, mining, agriculture, and commodities, and shipped the MVP into production.
• Built the agentic harness for autonomous geospatial analysis, a RAG pipeline over domain knowledge, and a cloud-native serverless notebook (on-demand VMs, cloud-storage-as-filesystem) shared between humans and agents.
• Implemented the full web app end-to-end: React/TypeScript, Node.js/FastAPI, Clerk auth, Supabase data, IaC on GCP/AWS, CI/CD.
• FDE-style work on enterprise sales: technical demos, custom solutions, and technical due diligence with investors.
• Established engineering foundations from day one (trunk-based development, CI/CD, IaC, PostHog for PLG); hired and managed three freelancers.

Tech Stack: TypeScript, React, Node.js, Python, FastAPI, Agno, PostgreSQL (Supabase), Clerk, Terraform, GCP, AWS Bedrock, Earth Engine.

Entrepreneur in Residence at Antler VC

January 2024 – April 2024 · Berlin/Munich, DE

Selected into Antler’s European cohort (top 1% of applicants). Found a co-founder, validated multiple problem spaces with prospective customers, and developed the technical and product roadmap for the venture that became LYRASENSE.

Tech Lead at Volkswagen Group Charging GmbH (Elli)

May 2020 – September 2023 (3 yrs 5 mos) · Munich, DE

Joined Elli as Software Engineer and got two promotions, first to Senior Engineer, then Staff Engineer. As Staff Engineer assumed the Tech Lead role for a dev team. Member of the Incident Response Team since day one of the on-call rotation, with 3,000+ hours of on-call experience.

As Tech Lead, drove the reduction of technical debt from 85 to 30 tasks (~65%). Increased team productivity and reduced knowledge silos by systematically promoting pair & ensemble programming.

Key contributions across 3+ years:

• Planned and drove a domain extraction from the monolith into a microservice.
• Designed the concept and built the infrastructure for a central event broker powering Elli’s move to event-driven architectures.
• Defined the system architecture for the MSP 2.0 product, and built multiple features for it.
• Set up the monitoring & alerting infrastructure before the company’s first product launch.
• Represented Engineering in two ISO/IEC 27001 audits; led 18 cross-departmental event-storming workshops; organized GameDays for 51 engineers; led the Service Management Community of Practice; and supported hiring and tender processes through technical interviews.

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

Software Engineer at ThinxNet GmbH (ryd)

May 2019 – March 2020 · Munich, DE

• Drove the transition from monolith to event-driven microservices via an order management PoC.
• Built a driving score feature merging data across services; integrated backend i18n for European market expansion.

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

Backend Engineer at blik GmbH

May 2018 – May 2019 (incl. internship) · Munich, DE

• Designed a REST API for warehouse KPIs and a PoC for device management (DDD).
• Migrated the Kubernetes cluster from bare metal to AWS EKS via Terraform after a significant outage.
• During the internship, built a discrete-event network simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks, deployed on AWS for team-wide use.

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

Earlier Experience

• Software Engineer, Digital Product School (UnternehmerTUM), Jan 2018 – Mar 2018. Cross-functional product team on a ride-sharing prototype.
• Web Developer, Aristotle Racing Team, Nov 2015 – Jan 2018. Improved availability from 92% to 99.7% via synthetic monitoring.
• Software Engineer, Pandora Robotics Team, AUTH, Dec 2014 – Nov 2015. Autonomous UGV navigation; 2nd place, Autonomy Class, RoboCup Rescue 2015 (Hefei, China).

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.
• Backend: Node.js, NestJS, FastAPI, Express.
• Frontend: React, Vite (full-stack reach when the product demands it).
• Data: PostgreSQL, Supabase, MongoDB, Redis.
• Messaging: GCP Pub/Sub, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ.
• Cloud & Infra: GCP, AWS, Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, Helm.
• AI / Agents: Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral & Gemini APIs, Agno (agent framework), agent design, RAG, prompt engineering, AI-assisted dev workflows.
• Geospatial: Google Earth Engine, satellite/EO data pipelines, interactive mapping.
• Observability: PagerDuty, GCP Stackdriver, PostHog.
• Domains: Agentic AI, geospatial intelligence, EV charging (OCPI/OICP), ISO/IEC 27001.
• Practices: Solution architecture, DDD, event-driven architecture, IaC, CI/CD, trunk-based development, incident response, technical leadership, public speaking.

Languages

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