Dimitris Dais

Senior ML Engineer
🎓 PhD, MSc, MEng

📌 Open to new opportunities

Hi, I am Dimitris Dais — a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Civil Engineering

🔹 Experienced ML engineer delivering end-to-end AI solutions for complex, real-world challenges
🔹 Skilled in defining problem scope, data strategy, and selecting optimal AI stacks
🔹 Proven track record in AI innovation in academia (PhD, 10+ papers, 450+ citations) and industry
🔹 Strong hands-on experience with multimodal & generative AI: VLMs/LLMs 🤗, transformers, prompt engineering, zero/few-shot learning
🔹 Built and deployed cloud-based AI pipelines for real-time visual understanding and automated incident verification

💼 Professional Experience

Freelance — Remote

Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Sep 2024 – Present)
Athens, Greece / London, UK

Working on real-time detection models and decision-support systems for defense and civil protection applications

  • Enhanced detection performance across diverse real-world scenarios by developing case-specific solutions
  • Defined evaluation datasets and benchmarking protocols for multimodal input (RGB, thermal, NIR) for scenario-specific optimization
  • Designed and deployed a pipeline for automatic incident creation and verification using Vision-Language Models (VLMs)
  • Evaluated performance, cost, and deployment complexity tradeoffs between self-hosted open-source and commercial API-based VLMs
  • Collaborated within a cross-functional team to deliver robust, high-performance solutions

Freelance — Remote

Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Dec 2024 – Feb 2025)
Zurich, Switzerland

Delivered an end-to-end vehicle detection and classification system under real-world time, cost, and infrastructure constraints

  • Designed a real-time, zero-shot classification strategy using open-source VLMs, avoiding the need for model training or data annotation
  • Built a data collection pipeline to automatically curate datasets for future model fine-tuning and evaluation
  • Owned full project lifecycle: from problem definition and proposal to design, implementation, and delivery

Mavisoft

Tech Lead – 3D Computer Vision / Deep Learning Engineer (Aug 2022 – Aug 2024)
Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Led the R&D of cutting-edge solutions for automatic industrial inspections

  • Trained AI models for object and damage detection including tracking, segmentation, OCR, and pose estimation
  • Developed post-processing techniques and solutions to project detections onto 2D maps (GIS) and 3D models/point clouds
  • Managed the full product lifecycle: data labeling, model training, pipeline execution, evaluation, and testing
  • Mentored a multidisciplinary AI and software team while liaising with stakeholders to align AI systems with domain needs

ABT Engineering Firm

Machine Learning Engineer (Jan 2022 – Jul 2022)
Delft, The Netherlands

Managed the R&D Team (Developers, Machine Learning & Structural Engineers) to implement AI for automated building inspections

  • Oversaw dataset collection and preparation
  • Developed AI models for the automatic detection of different defects and applied post-processing to measure defect dimensions
  • Created 3D scene reconstructions and aligned detected defects within them

Hanze University / University of Leeds

PhD – Earthquake Engineering & Computer Vision (Sep 2017 – Oct 2021) Groningen, The Netherlands

PhD in Civil/Earthquake Engineering and Computer Vision Academic Award

  • Developed AI solutions for automatic crack detection on 3D point clouds; published in scientific journals
  • Attracted and led €30k project applying AI to detect and monitor cracks on buildings under earthquake loads
  • Delivered seminars and supervised student theses on AI applications in seismic damage assessment
  • Investigated seismic behavior of monuments in multiple countries using simulations and sensor-based structural health monitoring

Senso Engineering

Design Engineer (Sep 2015 – Aug 2017)
Istanbul, Turkey

Earthquake Research Group, Istanbul Technical University

Research Assistant (Mar 2015 – Aug 2015)
Istanbul, Turkey

🎓 Education

  • MSc, Earthquake Engineering – Istanbul Technical University (2015–2017)
  • MEng, Civil Engineering – National Technical University of Athens (2009–2015)

🔧 Skills

Programming & ML Frameworks: Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, scikit-learn, ultralytics, Hugging Face, OpenAI
Multimodal & Generative AI: Vision-Language Models (VLMs), transformers, LLM APIs, prompt engineering, zero/few-shot learning
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) & Q&A: FAISS, SentenceTransformers, LlamaIndex, LangChain
Computer Vision & 3D Reconstruction: OpenCV, COLMAP, Open3D, Metashape
Data Analysis: Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Pillow, PostgreSQL (SQL)
Backend & Deployment: FastAPI, Celery, Redis, Kafka, Docker, CI/CD
Cloud/DevOps: Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes
Development Tools: Git, GitHub, Visual Studio Code
Languages: English (C2), Greek (Native), Turkish (B1)