Ilias Politsopoulos

About Ilias Politsopoulos

Backend engineer with 13+ years architecting high-scale payment systems and distributed platforms. Currently leading payment platform engineering at Liberis, processing $300M+ annually through event-driven microservices. Deep expertise in.NET/C#, Kubernetes, and cloud-native infrastructure (Azure, GCP).I specialize in designing resilient financial systems that handle mission-critical transaction volumes. My recent work includes architecting a multi-source payment ingestion platform with dual-ledger architecture, establishing standardized microservice templates and patterns used across 30+ services, and implementing zero-downtime deployment strategies.Technical focus: Event-driven microservices • Payment systems • Kubernetes orchestration •.NET/C# • PostgreSQL • Kafka/RabbitMQ • Terraform IaC • Datadog observability • gRPC performance optimizationBeyond hands-on engineering, I establish architectural standards and reusable patterns that accelerate team delivery, drive technical excellence through RFC processes, and own operational reliability for production payment services.

Experience

1. Lead Software Engineer - Payments Platform

   Liberis

   Jan 2022 — Present · London, GB

   Lead architect and team lead for mission-critical payments platform processing $300M+ annually for thousands of SMEs globally. Designed and built multi-source payment ingestion system orchestrating data flow from payment providers into dual-ledger architecture through event-driven microservices, establishing the foundation for reliable financial operations at scale.• Architected payment ingestion platform processing transactions from multiple payment sources into settlement and reconciliation ledgers, implementing idempotent event handlers and saga patterns for distributed transaction consistency• Established standardized microservice templates and architectural patterns adopted across 30+ services, accelerating team delivery and ensuring consistency• Led gRPC adoption achieving 7-10x performance improvement over REST APIs through HTTP/2 and Protocol Buffers optimization• Spearheaded GCP cloud migration from Azure AKS using Terraform IaC, reducing infrastructure provisioning time by 80%• Designed zero-downtime Kubernetes deployment strategy using Helm hooks and automated database migrations• Owned operational health of settlement payment services, driving Datadog monitoring enhancements and establishing incident response practices• Built multi-region CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions across EU and US regions• Established engineering standards through RFC processes and conducted code reviews across 30+ repositoriesSkills.NET (C#) · Kubernetes · Terraform · gRPC · Microservices · Event-driven architecture · PostgreSQL · Kafka · RabbitMQ · Datadog · Azure · GCP · AI-assisted development (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code)

Education

• 1st Professional Lyceum of Korydallos

  Technical Diploma, Computer Science & Networking

  2006 — 2009

Skills

• Object-Oriented Programming (Oop)
• Windows Presentation Foundation (Wpf)
• Programming
• Visual C#
• Sql
• Asp.net
• Language Integrated Query (Linq)
• Html
• Model-View-Viewmodel (Mvvm)
• Wpf Development
• Management
• Cascading Style Sheets (Css)
• Microsoft Office
• Xml
• Xaml
• .net Framework
• C#
• .net
• Oop
• Json
• Entity Framework
• Visual Basic .net (Vb.net)
• Software Development