Stelios Charmpalis is joining NOFire AI as a Founding Member of Technical Staff on the Orchestration & Context team. He comes from Hotjar, now part of Contentsquare, where he spent five and a half years, the last three of them as an Engineering Team Lead. He has been involved with NOFire since the early days of the dashboard, and is now here full time.
What he owns is the part of an AI product that decides whether anyone trusts it. Not the model, and not the graph underneath it, but the moment a person is asked to hand real authority to a system and has to decide whether they will.
Background
He dates the start to 2006, and to an irritation rather than a job. The web was badly built, good experience was rare, and it was obvious to him that he could do something about it. Professionally it began in 2009: corporate sites and an eshop at ATnet, then a Drupal wine portal at Mobartia, then four years at Mozaik on hotel sites, blogs and mobile web, finishing there as a senior front-end developer. He took a Computer Science degree at the University of West Attica alongside all of it.
From 2015 the work got bigger and he started leading it. At Agile Actors he built an international hybrid mobile product for lotteries that shipped in Ireland, and represented the company at Athens developer meetups. At Pollfish he moved from senior engineer to running a team of seven, four frontend, two backend and a designer, shipping a React and Redux dashboard that handled analytics, forms, tables and Stripe payments. Then two and a half years at Lenses.io, first as a senior engineer and then as team lead, on a DataOps platform that gave people SQL access to data flows under fine-grained controls. Lenses is also where NOFire's CEO worked.
The last five and a half years were Hotjar, acquired by Contentsquare partway through: senior engineer from 2021, Engineering Team Lead from 2023. Hotjar exists to show teams how people actually use their product, which is a fitting place for someone whose whole career argues that experience is the thing worth measuring. Sergios Aftsidis, also on the team here, came out of Hotjar too.
Seventeen years has taken him from styling pages to owning entire product surfaces, and lately to pushing underneath them. At NOFire he built the instrumentation behind the time-to-value funnel, six stages from signup to first AI response, and put it server-side deliberately because adblockers quietly drop frontend analytics. Owning how a product feels turns out to require understanding everything behind it.
What Stelios will own
His remit is user experience for the AI era, in two halves. The first is the conventional one: the in-app experience, and making it genuinely good. The second matters more and has almost no prior art. As the product moves from advising to acting, somebody has to design what it feels like to grant a system real authority, watch it work, and stay in control while it does. Stack-wise, that is JavaScript and TypeScript.
He also does the cultural plumbing nobody assigns. The kudos channel this team uses every week exists because he built it, and he sits on the board of GreeceJS.
More about Stelios
How did you get into engineering?
- The web was a mess back then — bad UX almost everywhere you looked — and I realised I had the power to make people's lives easier. That pulled me toward UI/UX and building experiences that actually help, and I never really left.
Why NOFire AI?
Because it's a real problem, not a nice-to-have. I've always gravitated toward problems that slow people down or sit close to a real human struggle — and incident investigation is exactly that. And after almost three years in the enterprise world, something kept telling me it was time to switch back to startup mode.
What will you be working on here?
Designing and delivering great UX for the AI era: the traditional in-app experience, and — more importantly — the AI path, as we move toward the autonomous, agentic part of the product. Stack-wise, JS/TS.
Tools you rely on?
Claude Code, heavily, these days. And WebStorm, my partner for more than a decade.
Outside of work?
GreeceJS, where I'm on the board and help organise the meetup. Hiking, photography, and pilates.
Stelios is based in Greece. In his own words:
If you're working on observability or incident response — or you just want to argue about UX in the agentic era — my inbox is open.
