Panagiotis (Panos) Xynos
SRE, AI-Augmented Infrastructure
Github: @dark5un | Gitlab: @onlyascii | LinkedIn: panagiotisxynos
SUMMARY
I consider myself primarily, a Software Engineer.
A Software Engineer that acted upon the frustration of continuous breaking systems and decided to identify and fix the root causes. I started automating anything that felt like a boring task or repetitive process early on in my career, and I found that I had a knack for it.
I was acting as a DevOps or Site Reliability Engineer before these roles got invented. From the mainframes of yesteryear to the cloud-native architectures of today.
I’ve seen firsthand how even the most carefully designed systems can stumble. Remember Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, and Vagrant? I was there. Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Integration and Containerisation came as a natural evolution to me. I cannot go back to anything else. I want to go beyond.
For a while now, I experiment with Agentic Systems, AI Assisted Development and now Dark Factories. Exciting times.
My natural curiosity made me dig into different IT roles, making me a good R&D person acting as a glue between backend, frontend, mobile and (cloud) platforms teams. That confuses people, but this is my strength. I can understand the different layers of a system and how they interact. That helps me identify potential bottlenecks and failure points. From COBOL to Golang and from Cloud formation to Terraform. I now experiment with Rust because: Rust and WASM feel like a natural fit. WASM might be the future containerisation after all. I want to make portable tools that will automate fault detection and recovery. Maybe even a self-healing system that can fix itself without human intervention. I would sprinkle a bit of platform immutability in the mix.
I believe that the best SREs are not firefighters; key points: being proactive, observe and learn. Anybody can react to incidents with the proper and continuous training and exercises.
We primarily work with people. Sometimes process and not technology is the root cause of issues. I see all systems I work with (software and hardware), as live organisms that interact and depend on each other deeply. That is why, cascade effects are common in this line of work. I prefer environments that embrace automation, proactive monitoring, and a blameless post-mortem culture. Want a chat? I am here.
PS: No LLMs were harmed in the making of this summary.
SKILLS
- Cloud Platforms: AWS, GCP, Azure, Ali Cloud
- Containerisation & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, BOSH
- CI/CD: Concourse CI, Jenkins
- Monitoring & Logging: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog
- Scripting & Programming: Golang, Python, Ruby, Shell Scripting, Java
- Databases: SQL (MySQL, Oracle, DB2), NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra)
- Operating Systems: Unix/Linux
- Methodologies: Agile (Scrum, Kanban, XP)
EXPERIENCE
EngineerBetter (SAP), Remote – Software/Production (DevOps/SRE) Consultant
- May 2024 – June 2026: Production Engineer focused on persistence services (provisioning, handling, and operations) within the Cloud Foundry SAP platform. Responsible for onboarding and training new engineers on BOSH and Cloud Foundry, fostering a culture of automation and self-service.
- Acted as a technical lead at times, guiding the team on software engineering and AI assisted engineering in general. Build a tool that runs claude code inside a container while spinning up and configuring the llm company proxy tool.
GDS – Cabinet Office, Remote – Software/Production (SRE) Consultant
- October 2022 – March 2024: SRE for the GOV.UK central platform service, managing Cloud Foundry PAAS. Automated all aspects of platform operations using Golang and Ruby, ensuring high availability and scalability. Led the decommissioning of the platform with minimal disruption.
- Maintained open source BOSH releases and packages.
- Took part in a 24/7 rota and incidents with other engineers keeping GOV.UK systems running reliably.
EngineerBetter (SAP), Remote – Software/Production (DevOps) Consultant
- October 2021 – September 2022: Focused on persistence services within the Cloud Foundry SAP platform, including provisioning, handling, and operations. Mentored new engineers in BOSH and Cloud Foundry.
- Contributed to the open-source Loggregator component by implementing its mTLS feature.
PagoNxt, Remote – Digital Transformation Expert / Production Engineer
- November 2019 – September 2021: Production Engineer on Cloud Foundry, automating platform operations and enhancing team knowledge of BOSH. Implemented a custom “chaos monkey” BOSH release for service issue simulation, increasing system resilience. Deployed a new Cloud Foundry PAAS platform on an air-gapped network using immutable infrastructure principles.
- Was the most experienced BOSH and Cloud foundry engineer in the team. This led to a key role in upskilling the team. I am very proud on what we have accomplished.
- Worked on a highly governed and sensitive project that required air-gapped environments capable of updating in a secure manner using open source software.
- The need to fully automate most of the tasks and at the same time securing that no update or any other change will break the platforms drove me to to create a service that generated intentional issues across networks and services. Further more, my experience in immutable infrastructure design led me to redesign some several services accordingly.
- Introduced a lot of new BOSH packages and releases. Created a new BOSH package for python3 as at the time the BOSH package was outdated. Other implementations were HA Postgres and HA Redis releases.
EngineerBetter, London – Senior Software/Production (DevOps) Consultant
- May 2017 – October 2019: Collaborated on multiple projects, including work with Pivotal, maintaining Redis BOSH releases and co-leading Cloud Foundry and BOSH training sessions. Led a significant rewrite of the in-house platform automation tool, “Concourse-Up,” in Golang, enabling deployment to AWS and GCP.
- Worked as a client front consultant with Cloud foundry and BOSH expertise. My first assignment was a huge infrastructure project with multiple Cloud foundry installations, immutable and air-gapped.
- Worked with the Pivotal Labs team supporting redis service for Cloud foundry.
- Also supported several other clients and managed to provide a new Kafka cluster BOSH release.
Camelot Global, London – Senior Software Engineer (Full stack, Mobile hybrid development)
- December 2015 – May 2017: Started as a Node.js mobile developer then transitioned to automating the team’s testing process with Jenkins CI. Later assigned to the instant-win games team redesigning the platform and its API using Spring Framework and Cassandra.
- My proud moment in this role was the implementation and roll out of instant-win games platform. This involved using Java and Spring Boot Framework with Cassandra DB.
Agile Actors, Athens – Contractor, Senior Software Engineer (Camelot Global project)
- September 2015 – December 2015: Development on The National Lottery mobile application.
Vieno, Athens – Co Founder, CTO, Architect
- May 2014 – March 2016: Designed and implemented the Vieno mobile application backend.
Stone Soup, Athens – Co Founder, Tech evangelist, Developer coach
- October 2014 – September 2015: Worked with Cocoaheads, Ruby, Game and Android Greek user groups. Helped startups and freelancers.
Camerize, Amsterdam / Opsiz, Athens / One Click License, London / Yoconta, Athens – Contractor, Senior Software Engineer
- February 2014 – September 2015: Worked as a backend and devops engineer building APIs and server farms in cloud providers.
Logicea, Athens – Contractor, Senior Software Engineer for Boxtone Ltd (Columbia MD)
- May 2013 – May 2014: Development of a Enterprise mobility management platform.
Skroutz, Athens – Contractor, Senior Software Engineer
- October 2012 – March 2013: Built the optimised classification for the search engine of the portal.
PeoplePerHour, Athens – Devops
- December 2011 – October 2012: Systems orchestration with Puppet. Seamless migration of the site from a classic hosting platform to the cloud.
ICAP Group, Athens – Senior Software Engineer
- April 2011 – December 2011: Built B2B financial platform using JBoss technologies.
Fortune Technologies, Athens – Senior Software Engineer
- September 2009 – April 2011: Built the Operations and HSQE modules.
Vivodi Telecom, Athens – Senior Software Engineer (Full stack)
- October 2005 – August 2009: Designed and build the centralised service provisioning system.
Hellas On Line, Athens – Software Engineer (Full stack), Systems Administrator
- September 1999 – October 2005: Maintained and enriched the centralised service provisioning system.
EDUCATION
Edinc, USA – Bachelor of Science in IT & Software Engineering (2013)
The Open University, UK – Diploma in Computing (2000 - 2001)
Engineering High School, Athens – Diploma, Software Engineer (1988 - 1990)
INTERESTS
Role playing games - Tech geek - Extreme programming evangelist
EVENTS
Digital Empathy – A presentation at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2018