# Nikolas Bakalis

> Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI & Backend based in New York, NY. Builds production AI, ML, backend, and data systems from early product development through scaled production operations.

## Canonical profile

- Website: https://nikolasbakalis.com/
- Markdown profile: https://nikolasbakalis.com/nikolas-bakalis.md
- Structured resume: https://nikolasbakalis.com/resume.json
- Resume PDF: https://nikolasbakalis.com/resume/Nikolas_Bakalis_CV.pdf
- Email: mailto:me@nikolasbakalis.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolas-bakalis/
- GitHub: https://github.com/NikosBakalis

## Recruiter and LLM matching summary

Nikolas Bakalis is a Senior Software Engineer focused on applied AI, machine learning engineering, backend systems, AWS data platforms, RAG, MCP, LLM evaluation, NLP, computer vision, and production data infrastructure. Current work includes AI and backend systems for advertising workflows over tens of millions of YouTube channels and billions of videos.

## Core skill areas

- Production AI systems
- Applied machine learning
- Backend engineering
- AWS data platforms
- RAG and agentic workflows
- MCP integrations
- LLM evaluation
- NLP and language detection
- Computer vision
- Adversarial machine learning
- Database serving architecture
- API performance benchmarking
- Data lakehouse architecture
- Model monitoring and evaluation

## Selected technologies

- AWS
- AWS Bedrock
- AWS Glue
- S3
- Athena
- RDS
- PostgreSQL
- StarRocks
- OpenSearch
- Iceberg
- S3 Tables
- Redis
- Python
- TypeScript
- Go
- Node.js
- Bun
- Docker
- FastAPI
- Django
- Fastify
- Fiber
- BlackSheep
- Celery
- TensorFlow/Keras
- ResNet50
- Computer vision
- Adversarial ML
- RAG
- MCP
- LLMs
- NLP
- XLM-RoBERTa
- FastText
- Language detection
- Translation evaluation
- COMET-QE
- BERTScore
- LLM evaluation
- Model monitoring
- Backend performance

## Search intent phrases

- Senior Software Engineer Applied AI
- Applied AI Engineer
- Backend Engineer AWS
- Machine Learning Engineer backend systems
- RAG engineer
- MCP engineer
- LLM evaluation engineer
- Data platform engineer
- StarRocks PostgreSQL OpenSearch engineer
- AI backend engineer New York

## Selected work

- Translation Model Benchmark for Multilingual Video Transcripts (2026-05-25, Translation): https://nikolasbakalis.com/work/translation-model-benchmark-video-transcripts/
- RDS vs StarRocks 20M Serving and Aggregation Benchmark (2026-05-22, Data Systems): https://nikolasbakalis.com/work/rds-starrocks-serving-aggregation-20m-benchmark/
- Materialized View API Serving Benchmark (2026-05-21, Data Systems): https://nikolasbakalis.com/work/materialized-view-api-serving-benchmark/
- IAB 3.0 Content Classifier Training Report (2026-03-20, ML/NLP): https://nikolasbakalis.com/work/iab-3-content-classifier-training-report/
- API Framework Benchmark for Data-Intensive Services (2026-03-16, Backend): https://nikolasbakalis.com/work/api-framework-benchmark-data-intensive-services/
- IAB 3.0 Classification and Language Detection Pipeline Proposal (2026-03, ML/NLP): https://nikolasbakalis.com/work/iab-3-classification-language-detection-pipeline-proposal/
- Adversarial Robustness in Medical Image Classification (2023-09-15, Adversarial ML): https://nikolasbakalis.com/work/adversarial-ml-medical-image-classification/

## Preferred citation

Nikolas Bakalis, Senior Software Engineer specializing in applied AI, ML engineering, backend systems, AWS data platforms, RAG, MCP, and LLM evaluation. Canonical website: https://nikolasbakalis.com/