Nestoras Stefanou

Head of Platform

VRChat Inc

Mar 2026 - Current (7 months)

Platform Engineering Manager

Elastic

Jun 2025 - Mar 2026 (10 months)

● Lead the Productivity Foundations team (11 engineers) within Engineering Productivity, focused on improving developer effectiveness, reliability standards, and platform maturity across Elastic Cloud.
● As DRI for Developer Environments, own the strategy and roadmap for improving build, deploy, and runtime workflows at company scale, balancing reliability, cost efficiency, and developer velocity.
● Reduced reactive workload and operational friction by establishing clear service ownership models, structured operational reviews, and KTLO governance.
● Defined service tiers and SLO expectations, enabling data-driven reliability discussions with leadership and improving cross-team accountability.
● Partner with directors, t

Principal Platform Engineer

Arceeai

Jun 2024 - Jun 2025 (1 year 1 month)

● Led a 4-engineer platform pod focused on building self-service infrastructure and improving developer workflows through GitOps automation.
● Led the end-to-end design and implementation of a fully GitOps-driven internal platform, reducing deployment errors and manual intervention by ~80% and enabling safe, repeatable delivery workflows.
● Built internal Golang CLI tooling to streamline Kubernetes and GitOps operations, improving developer ergonomics and reducing friction in daily workflows.
● Architected a scalable multi-cluster Kubernetes platform (hub-and-spoke model), enabling rapid environment provisioning and strong tenant isolation.
● Designed and implemented a cost-efficient observability stack (Mimir, Loki, Tem

Principal Platform Engineer

Narrator

Jan 2023 - Jun 2024 (1 year 6 months)

● Led the migration from ECS/Lambda to a resilient multi-region Kubernetes platform, standardizing CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions + ArgoCD) to improve deployment reliability and engineering velocity.
● Designed internal automation tooling in Golang to orchestrate configuration and secret management.
● Reduced mean time to detection (MTTD) by ~60% by improving observability, operational runbooks, and automated health validation workflows.
● Introduced progressive delivery practices (Argo Rollouts) with automated rollback and metrics-based release gating, enabling safer and more predictable software changes.
● Built end-to-end infrastructure validation frameworks (Terratest) to establish reliable, repeatable “golden paths

Senior Engineering Manager Backend Platform @ Beat

FREENOW

Aug 2021 - Jan 2023 (1 year 6 months)

● Led a 30-engineer platform organization across four SRE and SET teams, consistently meeting 99.9% SLA in a high-scale production environment through clear ownership and reliability-driven execution.
● Restructured the platform organization to clarify ownership and drive alignment across 9 engineering domains, enabling predictable delivery amid competing priorities.
● Achieved ~50% infrastructure cost reduction while improving reliability through provider negotiations, architectural changes, and data-driven optimizations.
● Formalized the SRE function, defining SLIs/SLOs and introducing observability and delivery metrics to expose SDLC bottlenecks.
● Raised the hiring bar via structured interview rubrics and calibrated

Site Reliability Engineering Manager @ Beat

FREENOW

Jan 2020 - Aug 2021 (1 year 8 months)

● Built and scaled a new SRE team (5 engineers), hiring and developing talent to deliver infrastructure automation and self-service platforms that reduced SDLC friction and improved developer experience.
● Reduced operational toil by approximately 80% by redesigning the SRE–backend interaction model around GitOps self-service (“one-PR” workflows), shifting ownership to product engineers and enabling direct contributions to shared platform repositories used by 100+ engineers.
● Delivered a production-grade Infrastructure as Code (IaC) library with semantic versioning and end-to-end Terratest validation, reducing risk and increasing confidence in infrastructure changes.
Introduced cost transparency and DORA metrics dashboards t

Principal DevOps Engineer

Transifex

Sep 2019 - Jan 2020 (5 months)

● Defined and led the infrastructure modernization strategy, transitioning the organization to a Kubernetes-native platform aligned with scalability and cost-efficiency goals.
● Mentored engineering teams on infrastructure design, Terraform standards, and microservice delivery patterns to improve autonomy and delivery consistency.
● Introduced progressive delivery practices (Istio-based canary and traffic shaping) to improve release safety without slowing developer workflows.

Senior DevOps Engineer

Transifex

May 2018 - Aug 2019 (1 year 4 months)

●Led migration from Rackspace to AWS and modernized architecture from VMs to Kubernetes, significantly improving scalability and operational resilience.
● Enabled independent service delivery by decomposing a monolith into microservices and building internal Golang-based deployment tooling.
● Established infrastructure validation frameworks (Terratest) and standardized Terraform provisioning workflows to reduce manual intervention and deployment risk.
● Achieved ~40% infrastructure cost reduction through architectural simplification and resource optimization.

Founder

Famistar

Feb 2016 - Apr 2018 (2 years 3 months)

● Co-founded a social content discovery startup, building a distributed microservices-based backend in Golang deployed on AWS.
● Scaled the platform to 10,000+ users and 100,000+ user-generated photos.
● Gained hands-on experience in early-stage product development, balancing technical ambition with market validation and execution constraints.

Technical Lead - Senior PHP Golang Software Engineer

Intelen Inc

Jun 2014 - May 2018 (4 years)

● Acted as technical lead for a 15-engineer project group(frontend/backend/mobile), driving backend architecture decisions and coordinating cross-team delivery across multiple environments and localized platforms.
● Designed and implemented the initial hiring and interview process for backend engineers, introducing structured evaluation practices as the team scaled.
● Led the migration from Azure to AWS, improving scalability, cost efficiency, and deployment velocity.
● Initiated the adoption of platform engineering practices, standardizing CI/CD workflows, infrastructure automation, and monitoring foundations.

PHP Software Engineer

Atcom Internet Multimedia SA

Jan 2013 - Jun 2014 (1 year 6 months)

Contributed to high-traffic backend systems for one of Southeast Europe’s largest affiliate networks, supporting scalable campaign tracking and reporting infrastructure.

PHP Software Developer

Athens Medical Center

Oct 2012 - Jan 2013 (4 months)

Contributed to early-stage digital health platform concepts, gaining exposure to secure system design and compliance challenges.

PHP Software Developer at Star Channel

Star Channel Nea Tileorasi

Mar 2012 - Oct 2012 (8 months)

Improved performance and scalability of a national news platform handling extreme traffic spikes during live broadcasts, gaining early experience in performance optimization and high-availability systems.

Freelance Web Developer

Freelancer

Mar 2007 - Jan 2014 (6 years 11 months)

Designed and delivered custom web platforms and early SaaS prototypes, gaining foundational experience in full-stack development, client engagement, and product delivery.

Nestoras Stefanou

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Nestoras Stefanou

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