Available for freelance workAthens, Greece
I'm Alex Papanikos, an engineer in Athens, Greece. By day I lead a team of ten at one of the world's largest iGaming companies. The rest of the time I take freelance work — product builds, MVPs, and frontend that has to hold up under real use. I came up through the frontend, so the interface tends to come out better than you'd expect from a team of one.
Expertise
Honest tiers. Frontend is where I'm senior. Full-stack is where I ship on my own. AI is how I move fast across both — worth being clear which is which before you hire anyone.
Primary
Most of my career, and where I lead teams. Design systems that scale across products and squads, state that got complicated, a high accessibility bar, and pages that stay fast under real conditions — Core Web Vitals, render and bundle budgets, the lot. This is the part I'd stake my reputation on.
Secondary
Enough to take a product from schema to shipped on my own: auth, data model, and the row-level security that keeps one customer's data off another's. Edge functions, payments, third-party integrations, built to scale sensibly. I use AI tooling to move quickly outside my core — and I'd rather say that plainly than imply the same depth I have on the frontend.
Cross-cutting
How I work, and increasingly what I build. I orchestrate AI tools across my workflow to deliver faster and span stacks I don’t live in — and I build AI-powered features into real products: LLM integration, chat and assistant UIs, tool calling, and lightweight retrieval (RAG) over your own data on Postgres/pgvector via the Vercel AI SDK. This is application-level AI: integrating and orchestrating models, not training them or running ML infrastructure.
What I do
I work part-time and freelance, mostly with founders and small product teams. Fixed scope when the work is clear, retainer when it isn't.
Whole features, or whole products. Next.js or Nuxt on the front, Postgres behind it, TypeScript the whole way through.
You have an idea and a date you need it by. I do the schema, the auth, the billing and the interface, then hand it over with notes on how it all works.
Where I started, and still the part I'm quickest at. Design systems that scale, awkward state, accessibility, and Core Web Vitals — pages that stay fast on a bad connection and maintainable as the team grows.
When a site got slow, or a codebase stopped scaling with the team. I profile and fix Core Web Vitals, rendering and bundle bloat, and reshape component and design-system architecture so it holds up as the product and the org grow.
Adding intelligence to a product without a research team. LLM-powered features, chat and assistant UIs, tool calling, and lightweight retrieval over your own data — integrated cleanly into a Next.js + Supabase app and shipped.
A few days a month, for as long as it's useful. Feature work, code review, refactors, and being around to answer questions.
Selected work
Most budgeting apps tell you that you spent €800 on "monthly expenses". Fyna tells you €250 of it was coffee, shows you the month-over-month trend, and lets you model what cutting it does to your year.
Product, design and engineering
A booking system for a small service business: real availability, Stripe deposits, an admin dashboard. The entire backend is Postgres and two Edge Functions. No Node server, no queue, no ORM.
Full-stack engineer
A portfolio site for a UI/UX designer in Athens. Next.js on the front, Strapi behind it, so she publishes and reorders her own case studies without a developer in the loop.
Full-stack developer
A single page for an electronic music artist. The colour and geometry come entirely from the artist's own gradient pieces; the interface stays quiet around them, under one grain layer covering the whole document.
Design engineer
Track record
2023 — now
Joined as a senior engineer on sportsbook and casino reward systems, then took over the team. Ten engineers across web and mobile, plus the internal frontend library the company builds its products on.
2019 — 2023
Led four engineers building B2B platforms. Moved the Angular workspace to Nx for build times that scaled, and designed the async multi-chunk upload the product ran on.
2021 — now
Client work and my own products, alongside the day job. Everything on this page came out of that time.
Contact
Email me with what you're building and roughly when you need it. I read everything and usually reply within a day or two.