Karolos G. Lykos

Senior Backend Engineer

Senior backend engineer with 10+ years of experience designing and operating REST/gRPC APIs and event-driven microservices in Go, across energy, post-trade/fintech, and marketplace platforms. I care about reliability and observability as much as shipping features, and I write code and documentation meant to be maintained by someone other than me. Comfortable owning a service end-to-end: design, implementation, testing, monitoring, and on-call.


Work Experience

Senior Backend Engineer

Power Factors - Full-time | Dec 2022 - Present

Power Factors builds software that accelerates the global energy transition, helping owners and operators of renewable energy assets collaborate, automate critical workflows, and maximize asset returns.

  • Own the design and development of microservices for the EMS (Energy Management System) team.
  • Build and maintain REST and gRPC APIs consumed across the platform.
  • Maintain and improve monitoring and alerting to keep production services observable and reliable.
  • Stack: Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, gRPC

Senior Backend Engineer

Vsale - Full-time | Dec 2020 - Dec 2022

Vsale is a virtual marketplace giving buyers a personalized online shopping experience. I was responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining Vsale’s REST/RPC APIs, internal libraries, and CLI tooling.

  • Designed and built Vsale’s REST/gRPC APIs.
  • Built internal libraries and CLI tools used across engineering.
  • Wrote unit and integration tests to guard code quality.
  • Wrote documentation so other engineers could pick up the code quickly.
  • Stack: Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elastic Stack (ELK), gRPC

Full Stack Engineer

Tradeline - Full-time | Apr 2018 - Dec 2020

Tradeline is a post-trade workflow automation platform for the commodity trading industry. I worked across the stack, building the platform’s REST/gRPC APIs and frontend.

  • Built REST/gRPC APIs for the core platform.
  • Contributed to the frontend using Angular 2+.
  • Contributed to the in-house UI component library.
  • Built Connector, an internal Go service handling bidirectional communication between Hyperledger Fabric and the main platform.
  • Worked with fabric-sdk-go and Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts (chaincode).
  • Stack: Node.js, TypeScript, Go, Angular, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elastic Stack (ELK), gRPC

Full Stack Engineer

Enerdia - Full-time | Mar 2017 - Apr 2018

Enerdia builds Ergacis, an integrated platform for solar O&M and asset management. I worked full stack on Ergacis, consuming third-party APIs and helping keep a real-time, high-availability platform running.

  • Stack: PHP, Symfony, Doctrine, JavaScript, MySQL

Software Engineer Intern

Accusonus - Intern | Apr 2016 - Jul 2016

Built a desktop audio application using the JUCE framework.

  • Stack: C++, JUCE

Projects

Feature extraction on handwritten signature images using GPU and CUDA

Thesis

CUDA, feature extraction, GPU, parallel programming

Ansible playbooks for provisioning a Linux server, including my personal website and homelab applications.

Archista

Public

An i3-compatible status bar written in Go, with date/time, sound, media, and Bluetooth widgets.

Hackertea

Public

A terminal UI for browsing Hacker News, written in Go with Bubble Tea.