👋 Hello, I’m Toli.
I grew up in Greece and have lived most of my adult life in the UK. I’m half Greek, half British, culturally and professionally shaped by both. I sometimes describe myself as a “Citizen of Nowhere” (there’s a book by that name, worth reading).
What that really means is this: I’m comfortable operating across boundaries,technical, organisational, and cultural.
💻 My Software Engineering Story
I’ve spent the last 15+ years designing and evolving distributed systems across startups, scale-ups, and enterprise environments.
I started my career at IFS, working on large-scale optimisation engines: travelling salesman problems, constraint-based systems, big, stochastic systems for enterprises across the globe. That’s where I learned to think deeply about non-deterministic systems, trade-offs, and complexity.
At cinch, I joined early and helped scale the engineering organisation as the company grew from startup to unicorn. I worked across platform, architecture, and engineering practice, eventually leading the Engineering Practice function and shaping delivery performance, observability standards, and cross-team technical direction.
Today, I’m Lead Architect at Flipdish, where I focus on platform evolution, event-driven architectures, and aligning technical strategy with measurable product and revenue outcomes. My work sits at the intersection of architecture, organisational design, and engineering capability.
Across all of these roles, one theme has remained constant:
I care about building systems that scale: technically and organisationally. Yet, they still fit in a person’s head or at the very least in a collective’s head (a team being the unit of delivery and ownwership of software).
That means:
- clear architectural boundaries
- observable systems
- intentional constraints
- platforms that reduce cognitive load
- engineering cultures that favour delivery over heroics
I still stay hands-on. I still write code. But I think in systems; not just services.
🧭 Strategy, Platforms & Leadership
Over the past half-decade, my focus has increasingly moved toward technical strategy and organisational clarity.
I work closely with founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders to:
- Define target architectures
- Modernise legacy systems safely
- Introduce platform standards (“golden paths”)
- Improve delivery performance
- Reduce organisational entropy
I’m particularly interested in how modern engineering organisations evolve: how architecture, structure, and incentives interact.
Tools and patterns change. Principles compound.
🎤 Speaking, Writing & Community
Learning and sharing energises me.
I regularly speak at conferences, appear on podcasts, and contribute to engineering communities. I’m a Datadog Ambassador and an Official Team Topologies Advocate.
I’ve spoken about:
- Serverless and event-driven architecture
- Modernising monoliths
- Delivery performance and observability
- Team Topologies and organisational design
You can explore:
- 🎙️ Podcasts
- 🎤 Talks
- ✍️ Writing
If you’d like me to speak at an event or join a podcast, feel free to reach out at [email protected].
In the past, I co-hosted the Behind The Buzzword meetup in Manchester — a space for honest technical discussion without hype.
🎓 Mathematics
Before software, there was mathematics.
I studied Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at the University of Patras, then completed an MSc in Mathematical Sciences at Durham University.
Mathematics trained me to think rigorously. Software taught me to think pragmatically.
I try to keep both.
🏀 Basketball
Basketball has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
I played at an elite junior level and semi-professionally in Greece, and later coached juniors in Nottingham.
Basketball taught me discipline, teamwork, and resilience — lessons that translate surprisingly well to engineering leadership.
The court has always been a place of clarity for me.
If you’re building something ambitious, technically or organisationally, I’d love to talk.