Western University

University of Patras

Building an awesome product...

Calm

Chief Technology Officer

Managing teams, growing and mentoring engineers and delivering products in the Physical and Mental Health space for payers.

VP of Engineering

Co-founder and CTO of Ripple Health Group. We built the team from 0 engineers to 25 during the two years of the pandemic, started and shipped 2 products. Closed a commercial partnership with a healthcare partner and went live in 2021 and we got acquired by Calm in March 2022. It was an intense gig, full of experiences and learnings. I am grateful to the team and my co-founders.

Co-Founder and CTO

Rally Health

@RallyHealth, we are inspiring a healthier you every day. Our aspiration is to become the most used consumer health platform by empowering consumers to take control of their health through technology.

In three years, Rally grew from a health engagement website with a team of 85 into a healthcare digital technology platform encompassing 5 products across multiple payers, employers, providers with a team of 400. As EVP of Engineering, I am responsible for the direction and strategy of the technology, on-time execution as well as the platform quality, performance and uptime. 

Key achievements:
a. Grew the technical team from 20 to 170+ over 2.5 years (total company size 400)
b. Successfully integrated Rally into UnitedHealthGroup Systems and scaled flawlessly (set the standards for quality, stability and scale)
c. Materially impacted the architecture of the DevOps platform as well as implemented SOA across all engineering teams (while keeping the lights on and serving live traffic)
d. Mentored and grew engineering leaders who independently operate their areas / teams, attrition 50% lower than the industry average.

I believe strongly in execution, technical and management excellence as a recipe to succeed across all levels of an engineering organization. 

Technologies: AWS, MongoDB, ProstgreSQL, Scala, RabbitMQ, Kafka, HDFS, AngularJS, Play, Akka.

Rally Health / Audax Health

Executive VP of Engineering

Continuing from my previous role, I managed engineering for Zynga Invest and Express games (with the exception of the Farm Franchise) for ~9 months. During the last 3 months of my tenure, I managed Game Services, Payments and Client Technologies.

Key achievements:

a. Re-training of the engineering team to mobile technologies and shift execution to mobile from web
b. Executed on a mobile invest and express Unity based game engine that allowed fast delivery of Unity based mobile titles by maximizing code re-use. This technology was used in games such as "Castleville Legends" plus a number of unreleased as of now titles.
c. Active and influential member of the long term client technology strategy for Zynga
d. Aggressively refocused the central/platform teams on strategic investments and re-evaluated the overall portfolio based on customer and business direction.

Team size (~120 at peak)

Zynga

Sr Director of Engineering in Frontierville. Expanded responsibilities to the divisional level running FrontierVille, CastleVille and one additional game currently in pre-production. The total team size is 70 Engineers

Involved in engineering leadership groups in the company outside of the scope of the division, helped forge guidelines at Zynga around engineering manager hiring, manager training and processes, also best practices on how to ship efficiently new games. The ultimate goal is to impact engineering across the company, make is more efficient and create a sustainable engineering environment while maintaining the Zynga speed and agility. 

Main responsibilities involve setting engineering vision and align it with the business goals, grow leaders in the organization, grow sr technical leaders for the division and the company, ensure engineering metric consistency across the division and share solutions across teams to reduce duplication. Last by not least, I am accountable for the smooth execution of cadence for all live games of the division.

Technologies: AS, PHP, Memcache, Membase

Senior Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering in Frontierville. Responsible for maintaining the feature candence (two new features per week minimum), improving the quality, effeciency and thoughput of the engineering team while maintaining the fast release pace at Zynga. Built a team of 20 from ground up and maintained talent, grown principal engineers and created one of the strongest engineering teams at Zynga.

Technologies: Action Script, PHP

Director of Engineering

I am the Dev Manager on a team of 10 developers. The team is responsible for the server side implementation of all protocols that WL has for accessing mail outside the browser (POP/SMTP, Developer API, Administrative API, Mail Data Access API). The team also owns the server-side implementation of protocols for accessing Mail, Calendar and Contacts from mobile clients (Exchange Active Sync for Windows Live). My current responsibilities include architecture and design, project management, people management, coordination with external teams on technical issues and handling of partnerships. I own the collaboration, coordination and orchestration between Development, Program Management and QA. I am accountable for the delivery of the services end to end from the development side. Challenges in the design include efficiency on memory utilization, strict performance and scalability requirements, 99.9% QoS. The most interesting non technical challenge is the coordination and interaction with multiple services/teams in the windows live ecosystem, increase development efficiency in a very large organization and make the collaboration with others effective and agile.

Technologies: C#, .NET Framework, ASPNET, IIS

Microsoft Corporation

Principal Development Manager - Web Communications Group, Windows Live

The team was responsible for the internet facing services of Windows Azure that expose the public REST API for blob/tables/queues to the customers. Team owned the definition and implementation of the API. The services provide authentication, authorization, caching, locating the user data and returning the data to the users from the various backend stores. Also we provide usage statistics that are leveraged internally for billing purposes and QoS statistics that are accessible by the customers so they can evaluate how to optimize their data partitioning. The team grew from 4 to 13 people over the period of 4 months through hiring and a reorg. 

I have also worked in the SQL piece of the cloud, architecting a manageability framework that would allow SQL Azure for deployment, imaging, monitoring, logging, BICI data mining and analytics. 

I received a Gold Star Award for my contributions in the Development processes across the whole Windows Azure group.

Technologies: C#, .NET Framework

Microsoft Corp

Principal Development Manager - Cloud Storage Internet Services, Windows Azure, Windows Division.

I was responsible and accountable for the overall design, implementation and quality assurance of the product. The product was a platform for managing a data center with no human interaction. The platform is able to image machines from bare metal, install applications, monitor the applications, detect and repair the well understood failures, monitor performance, predict errors, monitor QoS. I contributed in the design architecture in the higher level, I build relationships with other disciplines, I established/improved development processes andlast but not least  I contributed to the long term vision for the product and strategy for my team and influenced the direction of SaaS (Software as a Service) manageability across the company.

Technologies: C, C#, .NET Framework, ASP.NET, IIS, SQL Server.

Development Manager - Searchable Storage Platform Manageability, Windows Live Platform Group

Design highlights include:
*Design and implementation of auto-balancing infrastructure for optimal data placing
*Design of logging and monitoring infrastructure.
*Design of scheduling infrastructure for management tasks that reduces human interaction.
*Design of infrastructure for auto-healing of the system. 
*Work in a prototype for more efficient storage that offer search support natively and reduces the cost for operating the data center
During these projects, I worked closely with Operations, QA and Program Management to achieve results and meet deadlines. I mentored team members and I provided technical guidance. I organized the team’s processes according to Microsoft’s engineering excellence standards, I scheduled and managed the team’s deliverables over multiple releases.

Technologies: C, C#, .NET Framework, ASP.NET, IIS, SQL Server.

Software Design Engineer Lead - Distributed Site Management Team, Hotmail Storage Group, MSN

I was involved in the implementation of various transports for the XML Web Services. The transports layer is responsible for sending, receiving and formatting GXA messages to/from the wire. My code has to meet strict performance standards, be robust, secure and scalable. In addition, I owned the Hosting features of XML Web Services under IIS. This task involved a lot of cross-team/cross group communication and quite often I had to deal with uncertainty and deliver on-time high quality code. I was recognized by my team as the expert in my area and provided guidance, assisted in design decisions and applied the information about our customer needs and the competition to the product.

Technologies: XML, SOAP protocols, .NET Framework, C#, GXA protocols, ASP.NET, IIS, Web Hosting, networking protocols and transports(HTTP, TCP) .

Software Design Engineer -  Core Messaging Team, WCF, Developer Division

I was involved in the design and implementation of the debugging, tracing and logging support of the XML Core Messaging. In addition,  part of my responsibilities was to set up the necessary processes for the daily build and setup, educate the team on debugging techniques, profiling techniques and improve product performance both in .Net and native code. I have done analysis of the performance of competitive products, analyzed the customer scenarios and helped identifying concrete performance goals for all the areas of the XML Web services feature teams. The objective was to come up with abstractions of the core customer scenarios that will guarantee the performance bar of the product.

Technologies: XML, SOAP protocols, .NET Framework, C#,  C++, Win32, COM, C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, UDDI, WSDL, MSI and build support, Webshepre, BEA WebLogic, TIBCO, MQSeries.

Software Design Engineer - Infrastructure, Performance and Tools team, WCF, Developer Division

The CLR is the execution engine for the .NET Platform. The Developer Services consist of a set of COM interfaces that allow to the users to write debugging and profiling tools that target the .NET. I owned the Debugging and Profiling API testing. In addition to that, I have been writing tools and samples that were included in the SDK which demonstrated the use of the new technology. As part of my responsibilities, I have been communicating closely with third-party customers (Compuware and Rational); I have resumed partial Test Lead responsibilities for the Developer Services QA team, participated actively in recruiting, interviewing and mentoring interns and new hires.

Technologies: C, C++, Win32, COM, .NET Frameworks, C#, Visual Basic.NET, ASP.NET, XML Programming

Anastasios Kasiolas