Nikolaos Fourlis

ML Engineer · Athens, Greece · 19

ML engineer, ECE student at NTUA, pre-national karate athlete. I'm 19 and based in Athens. I work on sovereign AI infrastructure at a fast-moving startup — the kind of work that's shaping what European AI looks like. I'm drawn to the hard problems: the ones that sit at the edge of what's understood and what's possible. I build to understand. I compete to stay sharp. I'm here for the long game.

GitHub → LinkedIn →
Experience
Kiefer Tech / Sophea AI
Junior ML Engineer
Athens, Greece
Feb 2026 – Present
Part of a small team building the full production stack for Sophea AI — Greece's first sovereign large language model. Work spans model training on NVIDIA DGX B200, voice stack integration (ASR/TTS), and multimodal capabilities. The model serves regulatory document analysis, accounting automation, and enterprise customer support.
LLM Model Quantization SVD Hadamard NVIDIA DGX B200 Production ML
Aktor Group of Companies
AI & IT Intern
Athens, Greece
Jul – Sep 2025
Collaborated on the architectural design and prompt engineering of Aktor's first internal AI Agent. Optimized enterprise reporting pipelines by structuring large-scale SAP ERP datasets via complex SQL queries — bridging AI tooling with legacy enterprise infrastructure.
AI Agents Prompt Engineering SAP ERP SQL Enterprise AI
Education
National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)
Integrated MEng/MSc — Electrical & Computer Engineering
Athens, Greece
2024 – 2029
One of Europe's most rigorous engineering programs. Five-year integrated master's covering electrical engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, AI/ML, and robotics. GPA: 8.62 / 10 — targeting 9.0+.
ECE AI/ML Robotics Computer Science Integrated MEng/MSc
Projects
nanoGPT in C++ + WebAssembly
2026 · In Progress
Full GPT transformer from scratch in C++ — no PyTorch, no autograd frameworks. Implements multi-head self-attention, MLP blocks, LayerNorm, and AdamW training loop entirely in C++. Compiles to WebAssembly via Emscripten — runs a trained GPT entirely in the browser with no server dependency. Extends the prior micrograd-cpp engine.
C++ Transformers WebAssembly Emscripten Systems ML
AI Karate Analysis System
2025 · In Progress
Computer vision system for objective biomechanical scoring of karate technique. Built a 30+ FPS real-time skeleton tracking engine using OpenCV and MediaPipe, applying vector calculus for precise kinematic analysis — velocity, Center of Mass trajectory, angular momentum. Establishing a "Golden Reference" dataset to train anomaly detection models (Random Forests, LSTM) for performance benchmarking against elite athletes.
Computer Vision MediaPipe OpenCV LSTM Kinematics C++
micrograd-cpp
2025 · Complete
Scalar-valued autograd engine and neural network library from scratch in C++. Implements dynamic computational graphs, low-level memory management, and full forward/backward passes without any external ML dependencies. The foundation of all subsequent deep learning work.
C++ Autograd Neural Networks Systems
WhatsApp AI Chatbot
2025 · Complete
Conversational AI assistant with persistent memory, deployed on WhatsApp. Designed and deployed using Anthropic APIs. Implemented backend logic for user context tracking, session memory, and automated response handling. First end-to-end deployed AI product.
Anthropic API Python Backend Conversational AI
Achievements
1st Place — NVIDIA × Kiefer LLM Bootcamp
Feb 2026
First place among 37 participants in an intensive LLM program organized by Kiefer, NVIDIA, and OpenACC. Applied Test-Time Scaling and fine-tuning to build an AI-powered chat summarization system for enterprise customer care. Led directly to being hired as a junior ML engineer the following week.
Pre-National Team Athlete — Karate
Dec 2023 – Present
Distinguished member of the Hellenic Karate Federation's Pre-National Team squad. Competing at Greek national qualifiers. Daily training maintained alongside a full engineering degree and a professional role.
NTUA Top Student Cohort
2024 – Present
Consistently among the top performers in one of Europe's most competitive integrated engineering programs. GPA: 8.62 / 10.
Y Combinator Startup School
2026
Completed YC's intensive program covering product-market fit, scalable technical architecture, and venture-scale growth frameworks.
IEEE Computer Society — NTUA Student Branch
Nov 2024 – Present
Active member. Participating in ML and software engineering workshops, AI sessions, and student-led technical projects.
Contact

I'm always up for an interesting conversation — research, building, or anything in between.

hi@nikosfourlis.com GitHub LinkedIn