About
One engineer accountable, and a team when the project needs one
I am Nickolas Bosinas. I have been writing software since 1990 and working as an engineer since 1996 — more than thirty years. Since 2009 I have led engineering and technology teams, most recently as Director of Engineering at Grant Thornton Greece.
You get the senior engineer, not an account manager and a junior. I design the system, I write the difficult parts, and I am the person you email when something is wrong.
My work splits three ways. I build WordPress sites and plugins — including Iptanus File Upload, the most widely used front-end upload plugin for WordPress, which I have maintained since 2013. I build enterprise systems: business process platforms, cloud architecture, and identity and access management on Keycloak. And I build AI systems, which is where a growing share of the work now is.
Since 2016 I have also been part of Toptal’s engineering network — screened into the top 3% of applicants, and more than 2,000 hours delivered since.
Tell me what you’re building A reply, with an approach and a timeline, within two working days.
How the work is staffed
Iptanus is not an agency with a bench sitting idle. It is me, and it grows to fit the job.
Most work
I do it myself
A plugin, a theme, an integration, a platform of moderate size. One person who holds the whole thing in their head is faster than three who do not, and there is nobody to hand your problem to.
Larger builds
I assemble and lead a team
Engineers I have worked with before, brought in for the work and led by me, with the architecture and the code review staying mine. You keep one point of accountability regardless of how many people are on it.
Where it fits
AI agents do part of it
Not to bill fewer hours, and not for decisions I would not hand to a person either. Where an agentic workflow does the job — classification, analysis, prognosis — I build one.
I have run engineering at scale before. I was the first Director of Engineering of Grant Thornton Greece’s Technology Intelligence & Performance department, and on the Hellenic Police’s Smart Policing programme I designed the system and coordinated and trained five separate teams of software engineers.
What I have built and evaluated
Banking and government · Greece
GoBeyond, a business process platform
Built while I was Director of Engineering at Grant Thornton Greece. It runs complex business workflows and was installed in all major Greek banks and several ministries.
2021–2023
Law enforcement · Hellenic Police
Smart Policing
An advanced person-identification search engine, built from scratch. I designed the whole system and coordinated five engineering teams. I also built a digital twin of the target environment — its services and interfaces, with working face and fingerprint recognition — so the engineers could develop and test under realistic conditions.
2019–2021
Public procurement · Greece
Over €1 billion of tenders evaluated
Technical and legal consultant to the Ministries for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, Citizen Protection, and Maritime Affairs — aircraft, drones, anti-drone and surveillance systems, vessels and integrated information systems. As technical member of most of those evaluation committees I have assessed proposals exceeding a billion euros.
2023–present
Research · European Union
Horizon 2020 evaluator
An active European Union evaluator since 2017 for ICT, security, aeronautics and nanotechnology proposals, and an evaluator for the Hellenic General Secretariat for Research & Technology. I have also worked inside the programmes — OCEAN2020, INTERRFACE, OneNet and BD4NRG among them.
2017–present
The AI work, specifically
Much of what is sold as agentic AI is ordinary automation with a new label. This is what I am actually building.
Agentic workflows on AWS
I am currently building agentic AI workflows on AWS Bedrock and SageMaker, coupled with machine-learning models, for flight-data analysis and prognosis on an aviation project. Agents plan and call tools; the models do the prediction. Anything that needs a human decision still gets one.
Recognition and classification
Face recognition and classification with TensorFlow, DeepFace and OpenCV, generation with StyleGAN2, and fingerprint recognition — built and delivered, not demonstrated. The digital twin I built for Smart Policing ran on this.
Before software
1996–2009
Hellenic Air Force
I trained as an aeronautical engineer at the Air Force Academy and served as an officer for thirteen years — flight-line chief, quality assurance officer on F-5 fighters, and from 2008 Chief Engineer of the Greek State aircraft, the aeroplanes that carry the government. I am an accredited aircraft accident investigator.
2009–2018
Innovation and new technologies
I ran innovation for the Onex group, where I founded a nanomaterials company from a business plan written during my MBA, then managed new technologies at Intracom Defense Electronics, bringing the company into national and European programmes for unmanned aerial vehicles.
None of that is why you would hire me to build software. It is where I learned to build things that are not allowed to fail.