About

I'm Dimos Mertzanidis, a global digital technology leader based in Thessaloniki. I lead distributed engineering teams across Greece, India, and Mexico, building the digital claims platforms of a major insurer: the systems that show up on someone's worst day and have to work. The role also keeps me traveling, side by side with colleagues and partners from New York and London to Mexico City and Hyderabad.

I got here by an unusual road. My first degree was in metal constructions and welding engineering, and my first workplace was the port of Thessaloniki. There I learned to take a design from paper to steel: reading the engineering drawings, planning the fabrication, and constructing structures from zero for the port and the ships it served. It was my first lesson in what engineering really is, turning a design into something that holds.

I grew up around hospitality, in a family that worked in the restaurant business, and I got to learn the craft from the inside. Then came fifteen years running my own businesses: a restaurant in the heart of the city, fast-food concepts, even a summer beach canteen. I ran every part of them, from the kitchen and the floor to suppliers, licensing, and the books, and I designed some of the concepts myself, down to the colors, the menus, and the names.

Computers had excited me since I was a kid, so alongside the businesses I earned a Computer Science degree from the University of Sheffield. After college I took on freelance software projects on the side, and at 35 I made the full jump into the industry. In the years since I have worked across the entire software development lifecycle, in global and regulated business domains.

During the Covid pandemic I led digital solutions engineering at Pfizer's Center for Digital Innovation, building patient-facing products for people who were seriously ill at the hardest possible time: apps that reminded them to take their medication, tracked their side effects, and kept them connected to their care teams while the world was locked down. Everyone was talking about Pfizer in those years, and I was proud every time I said where I worked. But the quiet part, built for those patients, is what I am proudest of.

Everything I do traces back to hospitality. Those years taught me that the customer is a person standing right in front of you, and your job is to take care of that person. I have carried that instinct from plates to patient apps to insurance claims, and it is also how I try to lead teams.

These days AI sits at the center of everything I do. At work that means bringing agentic AI into enterprise platforms with the discipline they deserve: governed adoption, production resilience, and trained models that already make real decisions end to end. Beyond work I stay hands-on with the whole stack, from multi-agent systems and context engineering to RAG, local models, and evaluation. Claude Code is where most of that time goes: it is how I build this site, my own tools, and the experiments I end up writing about here. I do not believe you can lead this shift from a distance, so I build with these tools myself.