Portrait of Nick Kouvalias

Nick Kouvalias

Senior Full-Stack Engineer / DevOps

Summary

Senior full-stack engineer / DevOps with eight years building production systems: telecom platforms, low-latency WebRTC products, Laravel/Flutter marketplaces, and industrial computer vision. Works across backend services, React/TypeScript, cloud delivery, CI/CD, and production operations. Based in Sweden, planning to move back to Greece; EU citizen, fluent in English and Greek, and comfortable joining client-facing delivery teams.

How I work

  • Small, reviewable iterations with clear acceptance criteria and measurable outcomes.
  • Production habits: useful observability, incident response, and blameless postmortems.
  • Clear written updates, concise meetings, and technical notes people can follow later.
  • Tool choices based on the team and problem, not on one favorite framework.

Skills

Languages

Java · Go · C# · JavaScript · TypeScript · Python · Rust · SQL · Bash

Web / product

React · REST APIs · Laravel / PHP · Flutter APIs

Cloud & platforms

AWS · GCP · Azure · Docker · Kubernetes · Helm · Terraform · Nomad

Data & integration

Kafka · Elasticsearch · Redis · BigQuery

Quality & security

OWASP ZAP · Trivy · Keycloak · security assessments

Ops & delivery

Prometheus · Grafana · GitHub Actions · Jenkins · Git

Employment experience

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer — Onmo Sweden AB, Gothenburg, Sweden (remote)

March 2023 – February 2025

  • Built and operated a low-latency cloud gaming and playable-ads platform: backend services, React and TypeScript frontends, and streaming infrastructure.
  • Scaled the platform from no live traffic to roughly 1,000 concurrent users across regions; server choice used WebRTC metrics, not only geography.
  • WebRTC and media: Worked in libwebrtc / Goldfish bridge paths, including C++ and codec-level optimizations, to reduce latency and improve stream startup.
  • Delivery: Built the CI/CD and DevOps flow from scratch; releases moved from a manual day-long process every two weeks to weekly one-button deployments taking about 10–15 minutes with tests and rollback paths.
  • Hybrid cloud: AWS for emulator/game workloads plus on-prem servers; Terraform, Nomad, Docker, Prometheus, Rust observability, and BigQuery/ETL for streaming data.
  • On-call: Production incidents for real-time traffic; debugging latency, jitter, emulator launch times, routing, and burst scaling.
  • Security: OWASP ZAP and related testing; authored a formal security assessment for enterprise datacenter requirements (Vodafone India engagement).

Stack: WebRTC, C++, Rust, Node.js, React, TypeScript, AWS, Terraform, Nomad, Docker, Prometheus, BigQuery, AOSP/Goldfish, Coturn, OWASP ZAP.

Software Developer | Cloud Developer | DevOps Engineer — Ericsson, Karlskrona, Sweden (hybrid)

June 2019 – March 2023

  • Cloud-native development for a large telecommunications platform.
  • Portable delivery: BAM deployments using CSAR packages aligned with TOSCA across multiple cloud targets.
  • Kubernetes migration: Moved workloads from legacy Java VM style services toward Go microservices; Helm-based operations.
  • Streaming and search: Kafka-based APIs; Elasticsearch in operational paths.
  • Security and identity: Keycloak; DevSecOps in CI with Trivy, OWASP ZAP, and related checks; participation in pen-test workflows.
  • Reliability: Production incident handling; collaboration with PMs and cross-functional teams in sprint cadence.

Stack: Kubernetes, Go, Java, Helm, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Grafana, Keycloak, Jenkins, TOSCA/CSAR.

Back-End Software Developer — Ericsson, Karlskrona, Sweden (hybrid)

June 2019 – July 2020

  • Java services in a modular Apache Karaf environment (service discovery, licensing, feature control).
  • Performance: Refactored Feature Control so a critical API path dropped from about 15 minutes to roughly 3 seconds (data structures, DAG thinking, database work).
  • Quality: Test lead for end-to-end frameworks; reduced fault slip-through; build master duties for releases.

Stack: Java, Python, Maven, Apache Karaf, Zookeeper, LDAP, Jenkins, Ansible.

Lead Developer | Product Stakeholder — Talos Robot Vision, Athens, Greece (hybrid)

October 2018 – April 2023

  • Helped bring a laser seam-tracking sensor for industrial welding robots to life: UI, real-time image pipelines, sensor integration layer, and on-site technical sales support.
  • Built integrations with major robot vendors; developed custom communication protocols and low-level protocol handling, including Wireshark-based reverse engineering where vendor documentation was limited.
  • Product engineering in C# / .NET with Azure (App Service, Blob Storage, Application Insights) for parts of the stack; Docker where it simplified delivery.
  • Company stakeholder for the sensor initiative; helped coordinate engineering, sales, and support around getting the product into industrial environments.

Stack: C# (.NET), C++, OpenCV, TensorFlow, Azure, Docker, gRPC, protobuf, URScript, KRL, Karel, Wireshark.

Assistant IT Manager — Eden Beach Resort Hotel, Athens

April 2016 – October 2016

  • Network and property systems upgrades; 24/7 support for PMS, RMS, and POS; vendor negotiations.

Freelance & product projects

February 2025 – present

WorkSpo — marketplace workspo.com

Live Australian real-estate/property-management marketplace where teams assign work to tradesmen/taskers and track the full workflow in one system. Built the landing page, Laravel backend, and both Flutter apps (Poster and Tasker); owned REST APIs for jobs, hiring, tasks, tickets, profiles, reviews, notifications, Stripe, Pusher Beams, Jira workflows, and OpenAI-backed classification/moderation.

LifelikeAgents — voice automation lifelikeagents.com

Built real-time voice automation with LLMs, Twilio, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and WebRTC.

AI video editor — solo MVP

Built a prototype that turns a brief into voiceover, footage selection or ingest, captions, and a rendered video, with lightweight evals and guardrails.

Education

  • Software Engineering — Linnaeus University, Växjö — August 2017 – May 2018. Thesis: Python ML pipeline for human movement classification from Kinect sensor data.
  • Computer Science — University of West Attica, Athens — June 2013 – June 2017

Interests

Skiing, snowboarding, biking, windsurfing, chess, agentic engineering, AI tooling, modern web frameworks, and applied automation.