Nikolaos Michalakis is a technology leader, educator, and entrepreneur with over twenty years of experience in software innovation, distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and the digital transformation of large organizations. Founder of Red Vest Mindset, he works as a fractional CTO, advisor, and trainer for companies of various sizes, supporting them in the development of AI-native solutions, the adoption of software engineering best practices, and the construction of scalable cloud, web, and mobile products. He also supports leadership teams as an executive coach at GloCoach.

For over six years, he was one of the key figures in Toyota's software transformation within Woven by Toyota, where he held positions of increasing responsibility until becoming Technical Fellow. He led the vision and implementation of the Arene platform, the strategic initiative that aims to make Toyota vehicles among the most programmable in the world, and contributed to the development of Woven City's smart city technologies. As Senior Vice President, he led an international organization of over 400 professionals, defining the technical and business direction for software-defined vehicles, AI, machine learning, simulation, developer tools, and large-scale cloud systems. He was also an executive stakeholder in Dojo (now MS1), Toyota's flagship initiative for advanced training in software engineering.

Prior to his role at Toyota, Nikolaos worked at some of the world's most technologically advanced companies. At the Toyota Research Institute, he built cloud and big data platforms for machine learning, autonomous driving, and robotics projects. Before that, he was a Senior Platform Engineer at Netflix, contributing to the development of core libraries for the distribution infrastructure and creating internal training programs for engineers. He also held technical leadership roles at Metanautix (acquired by Microsoft), where he designed advanced machine learning-based scheduling systems, and at Knewton (acquired by Wiley), where he led teams dedicated to adaptive learning systems.

Throughout his career, he has worked on distributed infrastructure, AI, big data, recommendation systems, security systems, robotics, autonomy, real-time data processing, and software architectures at companies such as Adconion Media Group and World Evolved Services. At the academic level, he has conducted research in the fields of edge computing, pervasive computing, mobile systems, and distributed systems at MIT, New York University, the MIT Media Lab, and the laboratories of Sun Microsystems and Nokia Research Center. He is the author of scientific publications, patents, and thought leadership content in software-defined mobility and software transformation.

Nikolaos holds a bachelor's degree and a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a native speaker of Greek and English, and has proficiency in Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.