Profile
Stelios Psarras
Principal Architect & Technical Lead
I design, build and rescue critical systems; today that mostly means data and generative AI platforms on AWS. I build the foundations AI products depend on, and I lead the teams that run them. I'm still hands-on.
Most recently I was technical lead for a global pharmaceutical company's multi-tenant AWS Data & AI platform, which I first designed in 2021: the client built on that design after I left and brought me back in 2025 to take it further. About 25 products run on it. Each starts from the same blueprint, with its own Terraform, CI/CD with quality gates and Datadog observability, and is bootstrapped in under a working day instead of weeks. I also built its full RAG data path, from ingestion and embeddings to hybrid search and retrieval APIs.
Before that: a ransomware-resilient recovery platform across AWS, GCP and Azure for a major UK energy provider; technical leadership at AWS for the UK and Ireland systems-integrator partnerships and the expansion into Greece and Cyprus, helping customers move SAP, Java EE and big data workloads to the cloud; an AI and data science venture at The Economist; CTO of a fintech start-up; and critical systems for BBC News and UK government.
I work remotely or hybrid with UK and EU clients, as a technical lead, principal architect, or fractional or interim CTO. Engagements run through my own company.
Where the name comes from
I came up with the word cyantific on a cold evening in Glasgow: cyan for the Aegean sea and the Greek sky, scientific for mathematics, computing science and the biosciences.
I registered cyantific.net in May 1998, and it has been my home on the internet ever since.
1996–2000
2001–2002
2002–2004
2004–2007
2007–2010
today
- 1996coin"cyantific" — Glasgow
- 1998registercyantific.net
- 2002initCyantific.net Ltd — registered in England & Wales
- 2009branchCyantific.net Ltd Hellas — Greece
- 2015closeHellas branch
- 2024initCyantific.net SMPC — Greece
- HEADUK · EU — three decades in technology
Career highlights
- Designed a global pharmaceutical company's AWS platform in 2021; the client built on it after I left and brought me back in 2025 as technical lead to turn it into a multi-tenant Data & AI platform: about 25 products, each bootstrapped in under a working day instead of weeks.
- Built that platform's full RAG data path, from ingestion, chunking and embeddings to hybrid search and the retrieval APIs the LLM applications call.
- Led the design and build of a ransomware-resilient, immutable backup platform across AWS, GCP and Azure for a major UK energy provider.
- Only technical member of AWS's expansion into Greece and Cyprus, after leading the technical side of AWS UK&I's partnerships with Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini.
- Helped AWS customers and partners migrate SAP ERP, big data stacks and thousands of data-centre servers to AWS.
- As CTO of a fintech start-up, turned an early-stage monolith into a commercial microservices product while building and coaching a distributed team.
- Made the case to a global media company's board for an AI and data science spin-off, as its designated CTO.
- Rebuilt a Tier 1 BBC News API single-handedly before London 2012 (millions of daily views, no restarts in two years), then built the ESB BBC News used for elections from 2012 to 2015.
- Took a bank's mortgage application from 15 to 600 concurrent users in four weeks, two months before launch.
Career
2025 – 2026
AstraZeneca
Technical Lead, AWS Data & AI Platform
2024
Trainline
AWS Subject Matter Expert / Consulting Engineer
2022 – 2024
Centrica
AWS Subject Matter Expert
2021 – 2022
AstraZeneca
Principal Programme & Platform Architect
2021
NHS Professionals
Consulting Enterprise Architect
2019 – 2021
Amazon Web ServicesPermanent
Senior Enterprise Solutions Architect, Greece & Cyprus · Senior Partner Solutions Architect, UK & Ireland
Technical leadership for Greece & Cyprus, and for the Accenture AWS Business Group in UK&I. Helped customers and partners migrate SAP ERP, an Oracle / Cloudera big data stack, Java EE estates and a data-centre exit of thousands of servers to AWS
2017 – 2018
The Economist
Senior Technical Director (AI/ML, Data Science, Cloud)
Moved core publishing applications to AWS on EKS and architected the data lake behind the planned spin-off. Paused January – March 2018 for Shell
2018
Shell
Head of Engineering, Agile Delivery Hub
2017
HSBC Retail Banking and Wealth Management
Senior API Developer / AWS SME
2015 – 2016
Envizage (Lifescale Ltd)
Chief Technology Officer (previously Chief Architect / DevOps Lead)
2014 – 2016
Hive, a British Gas innovation
DevOps Tooling Team Lead · Site Reliability Engineer
Built an OpenStack private cloud for smart meter data and applications, which later moved to AWS
2012 – 2014
BBC
Senior, then Principal Software Engineer / Architect (BBC News and iPlayer)
Elections platform on AWS; iPlayer runtime configuration layer on DynamoDB, SNS and SQS
2002 – 2011
Enterprise & public sector clients
Senior IT Solutions Consultant (IBM WebSphere / J2EE)
Including UK Home Office, UK Border Agency, Ministry of Defence, Department of Health, DWP, Interamerican, Eurobank, TNT Express, Elsevier and Legal & General — several via IBM UK and IBM Hellas
2003
IBM International Technical Support Organisation
Technical Author (IBM Redbook)
2002 – present
Cyantific.net LtdFounder
Founder / Chief Technology & Product Officer
Cyantific.net SMPC established in Greece in 2024
2001 – 2002
PerficientPermanent
IT Consultant
1996 – 2001
Early career in the UK and Greece
Software engineering & internet technologies
Including 3Com, Carlson Leisure Group and Archimedia
Education
MBA Essentials
The London School of Economics and Political Science · 2024
Leading Global Virtual Teams
Yale University · 2024
Data Science & Machine Learning: Making Data-Driven Decisions
MIT · 2023
System Thinking
MIT · 2022
MSc, Advanced Software Engineering
University of Westminster · 2005
BSc, Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics
University of Glasgow · 1998
Publications
WebSphere Application Server – Express: A Development Example for New Developers
IBM Redbook
Research and Development of a Distributed Enterprise Portal
Languages
- Greek · Native or bilingual
- English · Native or bilingual
Expertise & technologies
Cloud
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud Platform
- Google Workspace
- Microsoft Azure
- OpenStack
- Linux
Platform & DevOps
- Terraform & CloudFormation
- Kubernetes (EKS)
- Amazon ECS
- Serverless (Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions)
- Messaging (SNS, SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ)
- Docker
- Ansible & Puppet
- Vault & Consul
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline)
- SonarQube quality gates
- Datadog, Prometheus & Grafana
- ELK / OpenSearch
Resilience & Security
- Disaster recovery & ransomware resilience
- Immutable backups
- Cloud security
- Access control: IAM, RBAC, OAuth2 / OIDC, multi-tenant isolation
- Observability & SRE
Data, Search & AI
- RAG data pipelines (ingestion, chunking, embeddings)
- OpenSearch hybrid & vector search
- Retrieval APIs
- DynamoDB
- Aurora / PostgreSQL / MySQL / Oracle
- neo4j & InfluxDB
- MongoDB & DocumentDB
- Redis
- AWS Athena, Glue, EMR & Redshift
- Spark
- Databricks
- Dataiku
Generative AI
- Amazon Bedrock (Knowledge Bases, Agents, AgentCore)
- Strands Agents
- LangChain / LangGraph
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Claude Code
Cloud Migration & Modernisation
- SAP ERP to AWS
- Java EE rehost, replatform & refactor
- Big data migration (Oracle BDA, Cloudera)
- Data-centre exit
- AWS DMS & CloudEndure
Engineering
- Python
- R
- Java & Spring
- JavaScript / Node.js / React
- Event-driven & integration (Camel, Karaf / OSGi, Kafka, ActiveMQ)
Architecture & Leadership
- Enterprise architecture (TOGAF)
- Solution & technical architecture
- Reference architectures, platform blueprints & landing zones
- Multi-tenant & cloud-native design
- API & integration design
- AWS Well-Architected reviews
- Architecture governance
- Product operating models
- Technical due diligence
- Fractional / interim CTO
- Pre-sales
- Agile delivery
- Leading distributed teams; coaching & mentoring
- Stakeholder management
Want to work together?
Tell me about the system, the team or the deadline. I'll tell you honestly whether I can help.