Hello, I’m Kyriakos

Senior Infrastructure Engineer with over twenty years of experience in infrastructure, security, and network integration. Based in Leiden, Netherlands. Building things on the internet since 1999 , networks since 2004 .

Currently building infrastructure with my own ASN and BGP routing across 4 countries, developing open-source tools like MeshSat and CubeOS , and working toward Kubernetes certification.

The Journey

My career path started where many of us from the early 2000s Greek tech scene began: internet cafés, helpdesk, and fixing things that weren’t supposed to break. From there, I progressed through technical support, systems administration (both Microsoft and Unix/Linux), network engineering, and eventually specialized roles in critical financial infrastructure.

During the last two decades, I’ve held positions ranging from maintaining navigation systems for 800 taxis, to implementing COMSEC for classified military communications, to engineering the SWIFT banking platform that processes transactions for companies like Facebook, Uber, and Spotify. Security was a primary duty in most of those roles — it tends to follow you once you’ve had a clearance.

My career has mostly been within structured, conservative organizations. When things got too comfortable, I moved on — always looking for the place where I’d learn the most.

Notable Roles

  • Adyen — SWIFT Engineer on the banking infrastructure that processes payments for companies like Facebook, Uber, and Spotify. Compliance, HA, security — working closely with treasury and infrastructure teams
  • Doctors Without Borders (MSF) — Senior IT Infrastructure Lead supporting humanitarian operations in conflict zones and disaster areas worldwide
  • SWIFT — Network Engineer for the backbone of global financial messaging, processing trillions in daily transactions
  • European Space Agency (ESTEC) — Systems Administrator for mission-critical applications, adhering to ESACERT security guidelines
  • 476th Electronic Warfare Battalion — COMSEC/INFOSEC implementation for classified communications (Hellenic Army, compulsory service that turned into actual security work)

Current Focus

I’ve long wanted to build infrastructure where I control the full stack — not just the layers my employer lets me touch. The result is Nuclear Lighters (AS214304 ) — a homelab spanning the Netherlands and Greece with BGP anycast routing, my own ASN, multi-site HA clusters, and GitOps workflows. The kind of setup you’d find in a mid-size company, except it runs partly in my apartment.

Is it overkill for a homelab? Absolutely. But my background is systems, middleware, virtualization, and network engineering — the homelab is where I get to own the parts I’ve only ever touched from the side, and break things without filing a change request.

View my projects →

Start Here

If you only look at three things:

  1. Agentic ChatOps — The most ambitious project: three AI subsystems managing 300+ infrastructure objects, human always in the loop. Self-improving prompts, 7-layer safety, 88K tool calls instrumented.
  2. Multi-Site Kubernetes with BGP — How I connected clusters across 4 countries with my own ASN, learned BGP the hard way, and built the network that runs everything else.
  3. System Status — Live infrastructure health with a D3 topology graph, chaos engineering, and real-time BGP/VPN monitoring. This is the homelab running in production.
  4. IPoUGRS — An IETF Internet-Draft for transmitting IP datagrams via unanswered phone calls at 1.6 bps. Not practical. Technically rigorous. The RFC that nobody asked for.

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