# Nikos Romanos K. > Engineer @ Snowflake Location: San Mateo, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/nikos Engineer with expertise in scalable and distributed data management systems. I have worked extensively in query planning, compilation, and execution optimization in disaggregated storage settings. My interests lie in performance, accuracy, and availability of real-time and analytical data management for traditional and agent workflows for AI applications (e.g., agentic AI applications). ## Work Experience ### Principal Software Engineer @ Snowflake Jan 2021 – Present | California, United States Tech Lead for Unistore (Hybrid tables), which is Snowflake's unified solution for analytical and transactional processing (HTAP). My contributions encompass, but are not limited to, Hybrid Tables' plan compilation, execution engine, access path selection, storage medium selection, constraint enforcement, consistency and concurrency control algorithms/protocols, index support, online DDLs, SQL features, and query processing. As a founding team member, I have been instrumental in, and contributed to, the majority of the architectural decisions. Hybrid Tables offer exceptional price-performance for both transactional and analytical needs, enabling thousands of customers to accommodate their agentic AI workloads. ### Software Engineer @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Nikos was a member of the AWS Redshift's Query Processing team. His work focused on re-architecting Redshift's components to improve availability, performance, and fault tolerance. His work focused on metadata management, data-sharing, and time-travel for metadata. ### Research Software Development Engineer @ University of Pittsburgh Jan 2013 – Jan 2018 | Greater Pittsburgh Area Development and deployment of tools for large-scale data analysis in distributed environments. In detail, Nikos' work focused on the adaptability of distributed Stream Processing Engines (i.e., Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, Apache Storm) and the trade-off between performance and accuracy, load balance, and scaling-out/-in operations. On top of this, Nikos deployed visualization tools for big graphs in Causal Discovery (https://www.ccd.pitt.edu/). Nikos' work was conducted in the context of public-Cloud deployments, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. ### Part Time Instructor - Database Management Systems @ University of Pittsburgh Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Pittsburgh, PA Part-time Instructor for CS1555 Database Management Systems course. Nikos' responsibilities were: creating and grading assignments, conduct recitation lectures, term project creation/grading. ### Research Intern @ Microsoft Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Redmond, WA Nikos worked on the Streams project of the Database Group of Microsoft Research, in Redmond WA. In detail, Nikos extended Microsoft's Trill streaming engine to dynamically generate code for efficient parsing of semi-structured data. On top of this, Nikos developed a parsing algorithm for semi-structured data, Mison, which improves JSON parsing speeds up to 10x compared with the state-of-the-art solutions. ### Research Intern @ IBM Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | San Jose California Big-data system integration project: Nikos' goal was the development of a generic method for integrating SQL, ETL, and Machine Learning workflows operating on different ecosystems, on top of a shared storage layer (e.g., HDFS, S3 etc.). ### Software Engineer @ Athena Research Center - IMSI (Information Management Systems Institute) Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Greece Software Development Engineer focused on the development of web services for serving ML models. The application stack consisted of a back-end infrastructure periodically producing models using SQL/ML Distributed Frameworks (e.g. Hadoop, Hive, Mahout). Model serving was built on top of Apache Tomcat, and offered a web-based Model access API. In addition, Nikos designed solutions for large-scale data anonymization using differential privacy algorithms, and contextualized e-commerce recommendation models. ### Computer Science Instructor @ Eurol@b Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 Nikos worked as a Computer Science instructor at Eurol@b. Nikos taught principles of Computer Science to young students (ages 8-15). In addition, Nikos offered private tutoring to University Students for programming with C/C++ and Java. ### Software Engineer @ Freelance, self-employed Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | Athens, Greece Nikos worked as an external contractor for developing CRM software for small and medium-sized businesses. Nikos' contributions included the design of software stacks using open-source tools and customized software for data analytics (e.g., collaboration-filtering, clustering, user profiling etc.). ### Statistical Analyst @ Galanis Sports Data S.A. Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 | Athens, Attiki, Greece ### Salesperson @ H&M Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 | Athens, Attiki, Greece ## Education ### Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Computer Science University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information ### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information ### Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Computer Science Ethnikon kai Kapodistriakon Panepistimion Athinon ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nikoskatsip --- Source: https://flows.cv/nikos JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nikos/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12