About

Elias Yannakeas is a self-driven software engineer and manager with over 9 years of experience in developing robust Ad Tech-related systems. He is currently working as a Backend Engineer for Personalization at Spotify, where he is responsible for expanding, scaling, and maintaining programmatically generated mixed media playlists. Prior to his current role, Elias worked as a Staff Software Engineer for Pricing and Senior Software Engineering Manager and Tech Lead at Wayfair. During his tenure at Wayfair, he designed and prototyped the real-time Product, Product Group, and General Purpose Recommendation System. He also led a team that continued the development of the Product Group and General Purpose part of the Recommendation System. As a manager, tech lead, and code reviewer, he oversaw a team of up to 10 engineers. Elias has a Master's degree in Computer Science from Boston University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Peloponnese. He possesses a diverse tech stack that includes skills in software engineering, senior software engineering, backend development, and recommendation systems. Elias is a go-to person at Wayfair, having won the Go-To Person Wayfair award in 2014 and co-created a system that won the Founder's Innovation Wayfair award in 2016. He has multiple examples of turning Hackathon projects into POCs and later standalone teams. Elias finds ambiguous problems, still at the inception level, where he needs to interact with business stakeholders to be the most interesting. With relevant experience of 11.87 years, Elias is a highly skilled software engineer with a proven track record of delivering high-quality solutions. He is passionate about solving complex problems and is always eager to learn and grow.