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Thanos Gkanas, Co-Founder & Head of Engineering at BrainStormers

Thanos Gkanas

TEAM · ENGINEERING

Co-Founder & Head of Engineering

Thanos Gkanas leads engineering at BrainStormers: 20+ years building systems at SAP, Pitney Bowes and Oliver Wyman, from architecture to rescue and scale.

Startups bring him in when an AI-built app starts breaking or production is down. Scale-ups bring him in to re-architect, unstick delivery or set a technical direction.

The drawing shows a system mid-migration and, under it, the legacy core, an event bus, the services moved out and the steps left: orders and payments out, then retiring the core.

EXPERTISE

What Thanos works on

Thanos's work is grouped by the kind of problem it solves: fix, build, run and advise.

FIX

BUILD

RUN

ADVISE

EXPERIENCE

Where Thanos has worked

20+ years of systems work across payments, trading, data platforms and online media, from startups to SAP, and co-founder of BrainStormers since 2018.

  1. 2018 to present

    Co-Founder & Head of Engineering, BrainStormers

    Leads engineering at BrainStormers: fixing AI-built code, handling production incidents, building MVPs, and designing architecture, DevOps and cloud setups. Startups and growing teams also bring him in as a fractional CTO.

  2. 2023 to 2026

    Lead Software Engineer, Find.co

    remote

    Led two engineering teams, ten people in all, on the company's core back office, used by its data and sales departments. Architected the move from a legacy monolith to secure, scalable microservices, designed the core data systems behind the company's sites, and scaled affiliate-link data from 10K to 120K data points.

    • Node.js
    • TypeScript
    • MongoDB

  3. 2021 to 2022

    Senior Staff Engineer, Lendis

    Berlin, remote

    Set the technical direction for three engineering teams and kept engineering aligned with product. Led the architecture decisions, was the main contributor to the core components, and moved logistics and invoicing from a manual monolith to event-driven microservices.

    • AWS Lambda
    • TypeScript
    • DynamoDB

  4. 2019 to 2021

    Lead Software Engineer, Oliver Wyman

    Dublin

    Tech lead across several projects: set the engineering principles, designed the solution architecture and wrote code. Delivered data analytics platforms for enterprise clients, and led delivery of a product-assortment optimization product that helps large retail chains plan shelf placement.

    • Node.js
    • Python
    • RabbitMQ

  5. 2017 to 2019

    Principal Engineer, Pitney Bowes

    Dublin

    Led a team of six engineers in the Payments Hub group, designing and building the microservices behind the full payment lifecycle. Designed the Smart Router, a service that routes each transaction to a suitable payment provider using rules such as IP origin and currency pair.

    • Node.js
    • Java
    • Couchbase

  6. 2015 to 2017

    Senior Software Engineer, SAP

    Dublin

    In the User Experience Design team, built the user-research module of a prototyping platform, with its rapid-prototyping features and interactive web interfaces.

    • MEAN stack
    • LESS

  7. 2013 to 2015

    Web Architect and Senior Software Engineer, InRuntime and Daredevil Project

    Designed the architecture and web layers of large-scale platforms, including a forex trading platform with real-time socket communication, affiliate tracking and live analytics.

    • Node.js
    • MongoDB
    • Socket.io

  8. 2002 to 2013

    Earlier roles

    Software architecture, systems analysis and database work, including IS Systems Analyst at Philip Morris International (2012 to 2013) and Business Architect at WIN plc (2009 to 2012). Built enterprise CRM workflows, e-banking modules, fleet management systems and media download platforms.

    • C#
    • ASP.NET
    • SQL Server

  9. 2017 to 2021

    BSc (Hons) Information Systems and Information Technology, Technological University Dublin

  10. 1998 to 2000

    Web and Software Development, IEK Glykos

THE APPROACH

How Thanos Gkanas works with your team

Thanos reads the system before he changes it: the code, the deployment setup, the logs and the people who hold the keys. The first thing you get is a short written view of what is fragile, what is fine and what to fix first. It is written so a non-technical founder can follow it.

When an app was built quickly with AI tools, that view usually starts with an AI code audit, followed by fixes in order of risk. When production is down, he works as your emergency software developer. He stabilizes the system first, finds the root cause, then writes up what happened and how to stop it happening again. An older codebase gets the same method as a wider health check.

On new products he leads MVP software development services with a scope small enough to ship. He adds AI features where a model can do real work for your users. Growing teams bring him in as a part-time technical lead through fractional CTO services for startups, or as a senior engineer inside their own sprints.

On the infrastructure side, he sets up deploys, monitoring and rollbacks, and reviews cloud architecture and what it costs. Investors and acquiring companies get the same method through technology due diligence consulting.

Every engagement ends the same way: a handover your team can run without him, with notes on what changed, why, and what to watch next.

I design, build and deliver software systems that need to work and keep working.

Thanos GkanasCO-FOUNDER · ENGINEERING

Services Thanos leads

Each one is part of custom software development for startups, the BrainStormers engineering track.

  1. AI code fixes

    Senior review and repair for apps built with AI coding tools: security, data and scale problems found, ranked and fixed.

  2. Crisis response

    Senior help when production is down, a release failed or a vendor vanished: stabilize first, then fix the cause.

  3. MVP development

    Scope the smallest product that proves demand, then build it with senior engineers on code you can grow.

  4. Fractional CTO

    A senior part-time CTO for architecture, hiring, vendors and the roadmap, without a full-time salary.

  5. DevOps consulting

    CI/CD, infrastructure as code, monitoring and on-call that a small team can run, set up with your developers.

  6. Cloud consulting

    Cloud architecture, migration, security and cost control on AWS, Google Cloud or Azure, sized for your next stage.

  7. Code audit

    An independent source code audit of security, architecture, tests and delivery risk, written up as a ranked fix list.

  8. Technical due diligence

    Code, architecture, security, team and scale risk, reviewed for investors and founders before a round or an acquisition.

  9. Team augmentation

    Senior engineers who take tickets from your board, review the hard parts and plan the handover from the first week.

  10. AI integration

    LLM features, AI agents, retrieval and evaluation built into your product, with cost and safety controls that hold up in production.

WRITING

Thanos's guides, alerts and tracker

Thanos Gkanas, BrainStormers Head of Engineering and Co-Founder, writes the engineering guides, the alerts and updates, and the startup stack tracker, and reviews the technical claims in Roger's product guides. For a short bio and photo, see the press and media kit.

  1. AI CODE FIXINGUPDATE

    Vibe coding security: why AI-built apps exposed data in 2026

    Moltbook, the Lovable public-project regression and UpGuard's 16,326 readable Supabase databases share one cause: missing or broken access control. What failed and what to check.Thanos Gkanas
  2. STARTUP ENGINEERINGUPDATE

    EU AI Act enforcement: what startups calling model APIs must do

    Since August 2, 2026 the AI Office and national authorities enforce the EU AI Act, and Article 50 transparency duties apply. What changes for startups that build on model APIs.Thanos Gkanas
  3. AI CODE FIXINGGUIDE

    How to measure and reduce technical debt

    How to measure technical debt, the types that hurt startups most, and a step-by-step way to reduce technical debt while you keep shipping features.Thanos Gkanas
  4. AI CODE FIXINGGUIDE

    Is vibe coding bad? What breaks when AI-written code reaches users

    Vibe coding is fast until real users arrive. What breaks when AI-written code ships, which apps are fine to build this way and the checks that catch problems early.Thanos Gkanas
  5. STARTUP ENGINEERINGGUIDE

    The MVP development process, step by step

    The MVP development process in six steps, from the riskiest assumption to a launch decision, with MVP testing methods and minimum viable product examples.Thanos Gkanas
  6. SECURITYUPDATE

    npm supply chain attacks in 2026: what startup teams should change

    Malware shipped inside trusted npm packages from March to October 2026, often with valid provenance and import-time payloads. What happened, what npm changed and what to fix.Thanos Gkanas
4 more articles
  1. STARTUP ENGINEERINGALERT

    OpenAI API deprecations: shutdown dates, October 2026 to January 2027

    OpenAI shuts down legacy GPT and o-series snapshots, reusable prompts, Agent Builder, Evals and older audio models between October 23, 2026 and January 20, 2027.Thanos Gkanas
  2. CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURETRACKER

    Software end-of-life tracker: the dates your startup stack can't miss

    End-of-life, deprecation and retirement dates for startup stacks: runtimes, databases, operating systems, cloud runtimes, frameworks, AI models and AI regulation, from vendor pages.Thanos Gkanas
  3. STARTUP ENGINEERINGGUIDE

    Technical due diligence: the process, checklist and report

    Technical due diligence explained from the reviewer's side: what investors check, the process step by step, a checklist by area and what the final report should contain.Thanos Gkanas
  4. STARTUP ENGINEERINGGUIDE

    What is a fractional CTO?

    A fractional CTO owns your technical decisions part of the time. What the role covers each month, how it compares with interim and full-time CTOs, and how to find one who fits.Thanos Gkanas

NEXT STEP

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