Alex Touloupis is joining NOFire AI to lead the Orchestration & Context team. Two decades in, he has spent the last ten of them on automation and orchestration, from tech-leading the Orchestration & Action product line at Celonis to Lead Technical Designer at Cegeka.
He is one of the few people who will argue that integration work, the least fashionable job in software, is where you learn what the problem actually is. That happens to be close to the thesis of the team he is here to run.
Background
It started at Ericsson twenty years ago, on integration: billing systems, IPTV platforms, the BSS stacks that telecom operators run their businesses on. Integration is where you find out how systems genuinely fit together, as distinct from how the architecture diagram says they do, and it is a useful place to begin if you are going to spend a career on orchestration.
From there the scale went up. He spent years running distributed systems at thousands of transactions per second for customers operating at FAANG scale, where the tooling had to be built in-house because nothing off the shelf held at that volume. Along the way he did backend work at a CPaaS company in Germany, then came home to start that company's engineering hub in Greece.
At Celonis he spent two and a half years as a Staff Software Engineer, tech-leading process automation squads across Kosovo and Spain and owning the Orchestration & Action product line: Action Flows, the make.com integration, SAP single sign-on for key accounts, all of it shipped to Fortune 500 customers. His colleagues there voted him customer impact champion across the product and engineering organisation.
He left in mid-2025 and took two months out, which he spent on self-directed R&D rather than resting: Astrothetis, an agentic orchestration layer for getting autonomous and co-pilot systems into production responsibly. He has kept building it since, alongside his most recent role as Lead Technical Designer at Cegeka. Ten years of his career now sit under the heading of automation and orchestration, on top of a much longer history in distributed high-traffic systems.
What Alex will own
Alex leads the Orchestration & Context team, which owns how an agent gets the information it needs and how its actions get sequenced. By his own account the job is less about writing the code than about placing the right bets: deciding which things are worth building, so the team ships work it is genuinely willing to put in front of customers.
That is a lead's job, and it suits someone whose background is integration at telco scale and orchestration at enterprise scale. He has seen at first hand what happens when the manual path is the only path, and the failure rate that follows. Anastasia Mallikopoulou and Stelios Charmpalis are both on this team.
More about Alex
How did you get into orchestration and automation?
It started at Ericsson twenty years ago, doing integration work. Billing systems, IPTV platforms, operators' BSS stacks. Sounds like plumbing, and a lot of it was, but integration is where you learn the actual problem.
Later I was running distributed systems at thousands of TPS for FAANG-level customers, where we built our own internal solutions, because at that volume the manual paths are where the failures live.
Then at Celonis I tech-led the Orchestration & Action product line. Action Flows, the make.com integration, for Fortune 500 customers.
Why NOFire AI?
I've lived with this problem. Enough incidents over the years, including ones where an hour of downtime put the company's reputation on the line. AI has accelerated release cycles dramatically, and the risk and the stress scaled right along with them. So there's no doubt we have the right problem in our hands, and having met the team, I'm convinced we can actually solve it.
What will you be working on here?
I'm leading the orchestration and context team, focused on helping us place the right bets on product development so we can ship features that we're truly proud to put in our customers' hands.
Tools you rely on?
- Claude Code for the last year, though I want to try the alternatives soon
- Google Docs for sharing designs and getting feedback.
- Nvim, tmux, and Slack emojis
Outside of work?
All my free time belongs to my two kids, who are making me rediscover the world. Once they're asleep I tinker with my own agentic orchestration layer, applying whatever patterns I've picked up in the field. I'm also trying to build a cheap Mars rover for future farming use cases, which is going about as well as it sounds.
Alex is based in Athens, and joins to run the team that decides what an agent knows before it acts.
