Nikos Fourlis

ML Engineer · Athens, Greece · 19
"you ain't never gon' be happy 'till you love yours" — J. Cole

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.

Kiefer Tech / Sophea AI
Junior ML Engineer
Athens, Greece
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.
Aktor Group of Companies
AI & IT Intern
Athens, Greece
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.
National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)
Integrated MEng/MSc — Electrical & Computer Engineering
Athens, Greece
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: 8.56 / 10.
nano-gpt-z
A controlled study of catastrophic forgetting in small language models. Trained a 17M parameter GPT from scratch on 1B tokens of standard English, then fine-tuned it on Gen Z slang across eight data regimes — measuring WikiText-103 perplexity and style shift at every step. Key finding: perplexity increases 47x after just 1k tokens of fine-tuning, while style acquisition plateaus at 18–20% regardless of data volume.
Connecting…
may be slow on first load · may talk gibberish occasionally
AI Karate Analysis System
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.
micrograd-cpp
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.
WhatsApp AI Chatbot
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.
Y Combinator Startup School 2026
Hand-picked out of 30,000+ applicants for YC's flagship in-person program in San Francisco. Under 5% acceptance rate. Two days at Chase Center with Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Jeff Dean, and Alexandr Wang.
1st Place — NVIDIA × Kiefer LLM Bootcamp
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 — Hellenic Karate Federation
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
Consistently among the top performers in one of Europe's most competitive integrated engineering programs.
IEEE Computer Society — NTUA Student Branch
Active member. Participating in ML and software engineering workshops, AI sessions, and student-led technical projects.

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