# Alex Tsilingiris

> Lead AI Engineer. Builds applied AI on high-volume data: insights platforms, large-scale data processing and analysis, and the AI applications on top. 10+ years shipping software into production, taking projects the whole distance from idea to a system carrying real traffic.

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- **Name:** Alex Tsilingiris
- **Title:** Lead AI Engineer
- **Also described as:** AI Engineer, Applied AI Engineer, Technical Lead, AI Solutions Architect
- **Focus:** Applied AI R&D, idea to production
- **Experience:** 10+ years building and shipping production software
- **Education:** Engineer's Degree in Informatics Engineering, MSc Computer Science
- **Certifications:** AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- **Research:** 3 peer-reviewed IEEE publications
- **Website:** https://alextsil.com/
- **LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/alextsil/
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/alextsil
- **Email:** hello@alextsil.com
- **Location:** Thessaloniki, Greece. Works remotely

## Contact

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alextsil/
- Email: hello@alextsil.com

## Summary

Alex Tsilingiris takes AI from an idea to something that works. Ten-plus years
building software that holds up in the real world.

AI is a confusing place right now, for everyone. The tooling evolves monthly.
Yesterday's best practice is today's dead end. And the hard part was never the
idea. It's the distance between a demo that dazzles and a system that still
works on Monday morning, with real people and real data going through it. That
distance is where he works.

What that takes is end-to-end ownership: the framing, the research, the
architecture, the build, and the launch. Working out what is actually possible,
what it genuinely costs, and what is hype. What comes out the other side is a
system that runs.

In practice that means insights platforms built on high-volume data: the
large-scale processing and analysis underneath that turns vast, messy, real-world
data into something a business can act on, and the AI applications on top that
people actually use: retrieval that stays grounded, agents that call tools and
hold state, and the evaluation that shows whether any of it holds up with real
users in front of it.

Underneath every one of those systems sits the machinery that decides whether it
survives: distributed, event-driven architecture on AWS and Kubernetes,
horizontally scalable, resilient, fed by ingestion pipelines carrying millions of
records a day, where "mostly correct" means silently wrong. Production AI is a
distributed systems problem long before it is a model problem.

He works remotely. He is active at conferences, where this field gets argued over
years before it reaches a changelog. Staying on the bleeding edge is part of the
job.

The road here was deliberate. Engineering in the Dutch startup space. Research
and software engineering at a university, teaching undergraduate and Master's
Computer Science classes, and publishing peer-reviewed research on large-scale
data integration. Then adtech startups, and after them a global leader in
adtech. Performance-critical systems where latency, scale and correctness were
never negotiable, because in that industry being wrong is measured in money per
second.

## Experience

### Lead AI Engineer, EXTE (2023 – Present)
Global leader in adtech.
- Applied AI R&D: insights platforms and AI systems built on large-scale
  data processing and analysis.
- AI applications on top of that data layer: retrieval and grounding, agentic
  workflows that call tools and hold state, and the evaluation harnesses that
  establish whether they actually work.
- The distributed infrastructure underneath: event-driven, horizontally
  scalable services and ingestion pipelines carrying millions of records a day.
- End-to-end ownership: problem framing, research, architecture,
  implementation, deployment and ongoing operation.
- Working at the point where the field is still being figured out, and
  translating it into things that ship.

### Lead Software Engineer, Noddus (2019 – 2023)
Adtech startup.
- Designed and built the software behind the company's core product: a
  programmatic-advertising integration system interfacing with multiple
  providers including DV360 and Facebook.
- Worked in tandem with the product team to deliver features quickly and stay
  ahead of the market.
- Built internal tooling to bridge cross-team communication gaps and enable
  system monitoring.
- Fully responsible end to end: planning, build, production delivery,
  documentation and long-term support.

### Software Engineer / Research Associate, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2017 – 2019)
One of Greece's top universities.
- Developed backend, mobile and analytics software in the big data sector for
  PTwist, a Horizon European open platform for plastic lifecycle awareness,
  monetisation and sustainable innovation.
- Social network integrations and mass data collection.
- Teaching Assistant on the undergraduate and Master's Computer Science
  programmes, delivering full class presentations on software and database
  technologies.
- Responsible for the lab's DevOps and infrastructure.

### Founding Engineer / Co-Founder, Reactive IoT (2018 – 2019)
- Built a prototype to test in the Industry 4.0 sector.
- Over-the-air industrial production-line data collection using custom IoT
  modules and sensors.
- 24/7 live factory production-line monitoring from any user device.
- Production-line breakdown prediction, preventing halts caused by sudden
  equipment failure.

### Backend Software Engineer, Lokalinc (2015)
Rockstart-accelerated startup, Netherlands.
- Replaced the platform's item search engine with a dedicated search backend.
- Built the shopping cart functionality and the PDF invoice generation system.
- Created unit and integration tests across the whole codebase while
  refactoring to reduce technical debt.

## Education

### MSc, Computer Science, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2016 – 2018)
One of Greece's top universities.
Thesis: *Data Integration of multiple Social Media platforms*. Distributed
databases, parallel workloads and large-scale processing; graph databases and
algorithms; machine learning.

### Engineer's Degree, Informatics Engineering, International Hellenic University (2010 – 2015)
Thesis: *Java code obfuscator*. Core informatics and hardware architectures,
with a specialisation in software engineering and computer networking.

## Certifications

- **AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate**, Amazon Web Services.
  Credential ID a9bb2133619849f299bb9734d4d1e2e4, verify at
  <https://cp.certmetrics.com/amazon/en/public/verify/credential/a9bb2133619849f299bb9734d4d1e2e4>

## Publications

- **An Online Social Network Data Integration system based on reactive microservices**. IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP '18), 2018. https://doi.org/10.1109/SMARTCOMP.2018.00059
- **Learning Programming through Design**. IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON '18), 2018. https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2018.8363478
- **Exploring Computational Thinking Skills in 3D Printing: A Data Analysis of an Online Makerspace**. IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON '19), 2019. https://doi.org/10.1109/EDUCON.2019.8725202

## Areas of expertise

This list mirrors the `knowsAbout` entries in the JSON-LD on
<https://alextsil.com/> exactly.

**AI and machine learning:** artificial intelligence, generative artificial
intelligence, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, AI agents,
agentic AI, Model Context Protocol, prompt engineering, LLM fine-tuning, LLM
evaluation, vector databases, embeddings and semantic search, machine learning,
deep learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, MLOps.

**Frameworks and tooling:** Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers,
LangChain, LangGraph, vLLM, OpenAI API, Anthropic API.

**Systems and infrastructure:** data engineering, stream processing, big data,
distributed computing, event-driven architecture, microservices, software
architecture, Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes, DevOps, PostgreSQL,
Elasticsearch.

**Domain:** programmatic advertising.

## Pages

- [Home / About](https://alextsil.com/): Profile, summary and background.
- [Contact](https://alextsil.com/#contact): LinkedIn and email.
- [Resume / CV](https://alextsil.com/#cv): Full work history, education and publications. Downloadable PDF coming soon.
- [Talks](https://alextsil.com/#talks): Coming soon.