About Me

Hello!

Hi, I’m Yannis. I am a Senior Software Engineer at Datadog in New York City, working on the Bits AI DevOps Copilot product. Previously, I led the Glue Data Management team at Amazon Web Services. I love working on problems at the intersection of Data Processing, Machine Learning, and System Reliability.

Education

I studied Electrical and Computer Engineering in Aristotle Univeristy of Thessaloniki, in Greece. I graduated in 2016 with a Masters of Engineering. My Master’s thesis was focused on speeding up nearest neighbor search by using approximation techniques such as dataset embeddings.

In the summer of 2016, I worked on mlpack, a scalable C++ machine learning library for Google Summer of Code, implementing proposed improvements to the Locality Sensitive Hashing algorithm, for example adding a Multi-probe LSH implementation.

In 2022, I decided to go back to school part-time, and enrolled in an Executive Masters in Technology Management program from Columbia University, where I learned how finance, management, and technology work together to deliver innovation.

Career

After graduating, I worked for a short while at MathWorks in Cambridge, UK as a support engineer, before joining Amazon Alexa as a Junior Software Engineer. I worked on the Alexa Q&A team (Evi) for 1.5 years. After getting promoted in 2018, I moved to the Evi Knowledge Ingestion team, where I was first exposed to Apache Spark and batch data processing systems.

In May 2020, I moved from Alexa to Amazon Web Services and joined the Glue ML team, where I worked on Machine Learning transforms for Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) pipelines in 2020. In 2021, I worked on Athena Spark Notebooks, a product that leverages Amazon’s Firecracker technology to offer millisecond startup times for Spark clusters and Jupyter notebooks.

In October 2022, I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer, and returned to the Glue ML team to work on Glue Data Quality. I was the Technical Lead for the Data Management team, where I focused on building a complete suite of tools for Sensitive Data Detection, Data Quality, Data Profiling, and Anomaly Detection across AWS data analytics products.

In 2025, I joined the Bits AI team at Datadog.

Hobbies

I enjoy reading books, both fiction and non-fiction. Since 2018, I’ve been keeping track of what I read, and I find that the Goodreads reading challenge motivates me to read more. On a typical year, I will read 25 books. My all-time favorite fiction book is Lord of the Rings. For non-fiction, it’s probably Thinking Fast and Slow.

I have been playing various Dungeons and Dragons editions since at least 2012. I have been the Dungeon Master for 4 groups, on and off in the last 7 years. Unfortunately this hobby requires several adults’ schedules to align, which becomes harder as I get older.

I love traveling, both in cities and nature. I currently live in New York City, and have visited several National Parks and forests in the contintental US with my wife. While I love traveling, I suck at taking pictures of my travels.

A new hobby I have been enjoying more recently is Comedic Improvisation. I have taken several classes in NYC and I am trying to eventually find the courage to start performing on stage. More than just a fun hobby, I have found that improv is a useful life skill that makes me a better listener.