Meet the
Red Vest

Nikos Michalakis is a Business Executive, Technology Expert, Leadership Coach, and Change Facilitator.

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Nikos has a strong track record of building sustainable organizations and leading significant organizational, business and product changes and transformations in the technology and software industries. Nikos has also been on a remarkable journey of leadership, developing himself as a technical leader, then people’s leader, and finally organizational leader.

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He has over 20 years of international working experience in a variety of roles, having been an entrepreneur, C-suite in an international company, Tech Lead, Technical Fellow, Senior Engineer, System Architect, Product Strategist, and Educator.

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​Nikos also has strong cross-cultural experience, having worked in different countries (US, Japan, Europe) and in very different organizational cultures (Research centers, Silicon Valley Tech, Swedish Telco, Japanese manufacturing and automotive, etc…).

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Nikos also set up Learning & Development internal academies and solutions and organizations to accelerate the technical upskilling of engineers and non-engineers. He is a content creator and a facilitator of those programs too. At Netflix he designed a program to teach new engineers how to build microservices from scratch and deploy them to production in minutes. In Toyota he built a company-wide school from scratch to create novel learning paths where thousands of Japanese engineers learned how to communicate in English, write clean code, manage projects in an agile fashion and reason about software development in a scalable fashion.

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Nikos has also had significant experiences in working in modern architectures and products in the web, mobile, artificial intelligence, robotics, and vehicle space and their corresponding developer tools and platforms.

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​As a Technical leader:

• He holds 20+ patents in the areas of UIs, autonomous driving, robotics, data management, vehicle operating systems, smart infrastructure.

• While at Toyota he led multiple efforts ranging from

  • the cloud and big data platform design and migration to AWS and machine learning tools to train autonomous driving and smart city AI models

  • the creation of a common software development platform with source code management and tools spanning 20+ Toyota subsidiaries and suppliers used by close to 10,000 engineers daily

  • a novel vehicle software platform for software defined vehicles adopted by next generation vehicles.

• While at Netflix he:

  • implemented core cloud services at the backbone of Netflix's content management system

  • experienced the day Netflix opened its service into 200+ countries

  • wrote tools that helped scale the productivity of Netflix engineers

  • maintained publicly visible open-source projects used in production by the community

• ​Nikos has helped develop software, products, and teams in a series of start-ups in a variety of industries, sizes and growth trajectories:

  • a 30-person big data start-up (acquired by Microsoft)

  • an ed-tech start-up that grew from 60 to 200 employees (acquired by Wiley)

  • an online advertising network that grew from 300 to 500 employees (acquired by Amobee)

  • a cloud provider start-up that grew from 5 to 40 employees

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​​As a People and Organizational leader:

• He has grown an organization from a team of 10 engineers in a start-up environment to a multiple-functions and business units organization of 500+ engineers, product managers, contractors and business developers in a multinational corporation in the span of less than 4 years.

• He has developed an internal Learning and Development academy to reskill and redeploy Japanese Toyota engineers through teaching agile thinking, software development, business/technology courses and English language skills.

• He has developed his own multi-week course for growing managers into the areas of scalable software development and how to build organizations that add value to business innovation.

• He has championed Diversity and Inclusion events and activities within the companies he worked for with a specific focus on Women in Technology and Neuro-diversity by partnering with external experts in the field and his HR business partners.

• He has advised and coached both seasoned leaders on how to implement innovative transformations as well as young entrepreneurs on how to improve their products and scale their operations and organizations.

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He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

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He also gives back to society by teaching children about computer science as DrTechniko.

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You can explore a selection of his public talks and interviews here.