Athens · available worldwide 38°N · 23°E

I build end‑to‑end data & AI products.

I lead the data team at CGTrader, shipping applied AI into production — visual search, pricing models, LLM agents. Ten years end to end, currently focused on applied LLMs and agentic AI.

roleHead of Data & AI
exp10+ years · end to end
focusApplied LLMs & agentic AI
01 — About

I'm a Production Engineer who became a Data Scientist. Ten years building end-to-end — warehouses, pipelines, ML systems, and most recently LLM-orchestrated agents in production. I'm drawn to problems where the answer isn't obvious.

At CGTrader, I lead the data team across engineering, science, and analytics for the Marketplace, CGDream (browser-based 3D AI generator), and Modelry. I architected the company's 290+ model dbt warehouse on BigQuery and shipped applied AI into production — CLIP-based visual search for 3D models, a real-time price-suggestion service for sellers, and two LangGraph + Claude agents that handle internal data requests end-to-end.

Before that, I led Data Science and Machine Learning at Reccodo, where the team owned Recommendation and Personalised Search end-to-end. We moved recommendations off heuristic and matrix-factorisation baselines onto embedding-based retrieval with learning-to-rank reranking — two-tower architecture and online serving — and built the MLOps backbone, so the team could ship rather than wrangle infrastructure.

On the side, I'm co-founding Sinequity, the first M&A for SMBs platform in Greece, built around an LLM-orchestrated valuation engine. I also sit on ITeQ's board as a Data & AI advisor.

I work hands-on alongside the team. I like problems where the answer isn't obvious, and teams that deliver innovative solutions.

Portrait of Yannis Pappas
02 — Experience

Selected roles, last ten years.

07 entries
2022 — present
Analytics Engineering Team Lead
CGTrader

I lead the data team across engineering, science, and analytics for CGTrader's Marketplace, CGDream (browser-based 3D AI generator), and Modelry. Player-coach: hands-on with code review, system design, and modelling alongside hiring, mentoring, and stakeholder work with product and the C-suite.

  • Architected the company's 272-model dbt warehouse on BigQuery
  • Shipped CLIP-based visual search for 3D models, and a real-time price suggestion service for sellers
  • Built two LangGraph + Claude agents that handle internal data requests end to end
vilnius · remote
2025 — present
Co‑Founder · Data & AI · side project
Sinequity

A marketplace for buying and selling Greek SMBs, built around an LLM-orchestrated valuation engine, agentic workflows for enrichment, and a data warehouse over the Greek business registry. Ongoing involvement is oversight-level while a co-founder runs operations.

athens · greece
2024 — present
Board Member
ITeQ SA

Advise management on data and AI strategy across the company's pharmacy network and SaaS platforms.

athens · greece
2020 — 2022
Head of Data Science & AI
Reccodo

Led the data science and ML team owning recommendation and personalised search systems end to end — from training data and architecture to deployment, monitoring, and online inference.

  • Moved recommendations off heuristic and matrix-factorisation baselines onto embedding-based retrieval with learning-to-rank reranking; two-tower architecture, online serving
  • Built the MLOps backbone: feature pipelines, model registry, training and deployment automation, evaluation harnesses
athens · greece
2019 — 2020
ML Engineer
Reccodo

Built and shipped the personalised search engine: ElasticSearch retrieval with a personalisation layer that tailored results per user via product embeddings and Redis-backed user profile vectors. Maintained the deployed ML estate and rebuilt hot paths into vectorised implementations to keep inference fast as the catalogue grew.

athens · greece
2017 — 2019
Data Analytics Mentor
Udacity

Mentored students through the Data Analyst Nanodegree: 1:1 guidance on projects, code review, and translating advanced concepts for varied levels of audience sophistication.

california · remote
2015 — 2017
Project Manager · Data Analytics
Niometrics

Delivered packet-level network analytics at carrier scale for Tier-1 APAC mobile operators (Indosat and Three) — covering network performance optimisation, subscriber behaviour and application usage analytics, segmentation, churn, and ARPU use cases. Owned the full project lifecycle alongside two other PMs sharing a 6–7 engineer team.

singapore
03 — Contact

Open to interesting conversations.

Reply rate I read everything; I reply to most.
Best for Applied LLMs, agentic AI, and challenging data problems.
CV Available on request — written for the conversation we're having.