Software Engineer

Iasonas
Kakandris

Building infrastructure where AI research meets compute — HPC clusters, MLOps pipelines, and self-hosted systems.

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Self-hosted services

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Node HPC cluster

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Years engineering

About

Infrastructure engineer
with a builder's mindset

I'm a Software Engineer at IIT, NCSR "Demokritos", working on Pharos — the Greek AI Factory, an EU-funded initiative bringing national AI computing infrastructure to researchers across Greece.

My work spans HPC cluster administration (Slurm, Open OnDemand, Ansible), MLOps platform engineering, and a self-hosted homelab running 20+ services behind Traefik. I hold an M.Eng from AUTh with a thesis on a declarative DSL for streaming ML pipelines.

Mensa member. Fluent in Greek, English, Italian, and German.

Stack

Python TypeScript C++ Java Dart Bash Docker Kubernetes Ansible Slurm Apptainer Kafka Quix Streams PostgreSQL MinIO Firebase Keycloak OpenLDAP Traefik Tailscale Grafana Prometheus Zammad

Infrastructure

Kubernetes cluster

k3s with Istio ambient mode — no sidecars, ztunnel handles mTLS at L4

k3s Istio ambient ArgoCD cert-manager Kyverno Authentik Sealed Secrets Trivy

HPC

Slurm cluster

3-node cluster at NCSR "Demokritos" — Open OnDemand exposes Jupyter, VSCode & RStudio as Apptainer apps

Slurm Open OnDemand Apptainer Ansible MUNGE ColdFront SSSD / LDAP MariaDB

Experience

The journey so far

Nov 2021 – Nov 2024

Software Engineer

SpaceDot (student space team)

Built the Angular operator UI to monitor and control the team's satellite data transmission system. Containerized the application with Docker, cutting deployment time by 40%.

AngularTypeScriptDocker

Jul 2024 – Sept 2024

Software Engineer Intern

Technology Without Borders

Created B2B apps with Microsoft PowerApps, reducing processing time by 98%. Designed an event management app with Flutter & Dart, and built a Chrome extension using Plasmo and Firebase.

FlutterDartPowerAppsFirebase

Jul 2025 – Feb 2026

MLOps Engineer

ICS, FORTH

Trained a semantic segmentation model for river regions (Dice 0.91). Deployed the data pipeline on Kubernetes with Kafka, MinIO, PostgreSQL, and Grafana. Built a full-stack web app for real-time model monitoring.

MLOpsKubernetesKafkaGrafana

Feb 2026 – Present

Software Engineer

IIT, NCSR "Demokritos"

Deployed Open OnDemand with Keycloak OIDC on Rocky Linux 9, exposing Jupyter, VSCode, and RStudio as Apptainer apps. Authored Ansible playbooks provisioning a 3-node Slurm cluster end-to-end. Operationalized Zammad, Outline, and Plane via Docker Compose.

SlurmAnsibleOpen OnDemandKeycloakApptainer

Projects

Things I've built & run

🦫 ● Live

Beaver

A declarative DSL for building ML pipelines on live data streams. Write .bvr files — Beaver generates Python that wires Kafka, Quix Streams, River, and Plotly/Dash together. Includes static validation, model analysis, a unified CLI, and detailed error reporting. Developed as my M.Eng thesis.

TextXJinjaKafkaQuix StreamsRiverPythonDocker
🌱 ● Live

ESP32 Greenhouse Monitor

Standalone greenhouse monitor — no PC required after setup. DHT22 reads temperature and humidity; two potentiometers set alert thresholds; readings display on a 16×2 LCD. The ESP32 hosts its own web dashboard and fires Telegram alerts when thresholds are crossed.

ESP32C++DHT22Telegram APIEmbedded
🕸️ ● Live

SixPath

Self-hosted professional network graph tool. Maps people, projects, and relationships through an interactive graph interface.

TypeScriptGraphSelf-hosted
🏛️ ◐ Building

Pharos AI Factory

EU-funded Greek national AI infrastructure. Building the platform layer connecting researchers to compute — HPC, Open OnDemand, identity management, and cloud-native services.

EUAIHPCInfrastructure

Homelab

Self-hosted stack

25+ Dockerized services across 2 machines — Traefik reverse proxy, Cloudflare DNS

Media

Jellyfin Sonarr Radarr Prowlarr Jellyseerr qBittorrent Recommendarr

Photos & Docs

Immich Paperless BookLore Syncthing File Browser Karakeep

Infrastructure

Traefik Pi-hole Portainer Beszel Uptime Kuma n8n

Finance

Actual Budget Ghostfolio

AI & Storage

Open WebUI OpenMediaVault

Curriculum Vitae

Iasonas Kakandris

Software Engineer · MLOps · HPC Infrastructure

Updated Apr 2026

Contact

Let's talk

Whether it's infrastructure, MLOps, or just a good conversation about self-hosting — reach out.