Engineering Leader and AI Researcher with extensive experience in AI/ML, Streaming Video, and Full-Stack Development. I specialize in building innovative, scalable, and impactful products enjoyed by millions worldwide.
Experienced at delivering secure, cutting-edge solutions in AI-powered systems, Web platforms, and Mobile applications.
Skilled at leading cross-functional teams, mentoring talent, and driving product success under tight timelines.
Dedicated to combining AI's intelligence with transparency and ethical practices to solve complex challenges.

• Founded Tendi, an AI-powered financial advisor platform praised for its role in bridging the wealth gap.
• Scaled Roku's international streaming platform to 6M+ active devices and optimized AI-driven content recommendations.
• Designed and launched Netflix's first video streaming UI for Xbox 360, spearheading the transition to streaming services.
• Designed Cisco's complete user interface framework for umi home video conferencing.
• Advanced TiVo's award-winning embedded televisiona television user experience.
• Pioneered advanced AI algorithms in personal finance, including RAG, RLHF, and fine-tuning for GPT-4, Llama3, and Mistral.
• Directed high-performance engineering teams to deliver innovative solutions in video conferencing, streaming, and consumer electronics.

• Frameworks & Libraries: SwiftUI, React.js, Vue.js, Next.js, Angular.js, Tailwind CSS, Gradio
• Design Tools: Figma, Sketch, Lottie.js

• Languages & Frameworks: Node.js, Django, FastAPI, Express.js, Nest.js, hapi.dev

• Technologies: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Supabase, Firebase

• Models: OpenAI GPT, Meta Llama, Mistral, Google Vertex AI
• Tools: PyTorch, TensorFlow, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, Hugging Face, Scikit-learn
• Techniques: RLHF, fine-tuning, data labeling, and vector indexing

• Platforms: AWS, DigitalOcean, Docker, Kubernetes
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Jenkins

• AI/ML: Model training, fine-tuning, and MLOps deployment
• Leadership: Building and mentoring high-performance teams
• Product Development: UX design, A/B testing, and user-centric solutions
• Scalable Solutions: Microservices architecture and RESTful APIs

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• Description: A lightweight and efficient news article recommendation API built with FastAPI, FAISS, and Sentence Transformers. It enables quick retrieval of semantically similar news articles from a dataset using embeddings and nearest-neighbor search.

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• Description: An application built with Streamlit, LangChain, Ollama, and moviepy that enables users to upload videos, extracts the audio channel to an MP3 file, applies an AI model to transcribe the audio, and then applies another AI model to perform sentiment analysis on the transcribed text, and visualize the results.

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• Description: An application built with Streamlit, LangChain, Ollama, and ffmpeg that builds a video description from individual scenes within the video by sampling video frames evenly, using an AI model to describe each frame, and then append the description to a text file.

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• Description: A research-driven project focused on fine-tuning Meta's LLaMA model to enhance its text generation capabilities using Unsloth, a novel technique for efficient data labeling and augmentation. The project optimizes the model's performance on domain-specific tasks by leveraging Unsloth's semi-supervised learning pipeline, enabling rapid iteration with minimal labeled data. Advanced techniques like LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) are used to fine-tune the model efficiently without requiring extensive computational resources.

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• Description: A PDF-based question-answering application built with Streamlit, LangChain, and Ollama. This project enables anyone to upload a PDF file, index its contents, and interactively query the text with natural language questions.

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• Description: A Webpage-based question-answering application that enables anyone to enter a URL, index its contents, and interactively query the text with natural language questions. You can optionally choose between Llama 3.3 and DeepSeek r1 models.

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• Description: A web-based image search application built with Streamlit, LangChain, and Ollama. This project enables users to upload images, generate concise descriptions, index them for efficient retrieval, and interactively search for images using natural language queries or by providing a similar image.

• Founder & Head of AI, Tendi (2021-2025): Created an AI-powered fintech startup to train a model specifically for personal finance.
• CTO, Crediture (2021-2024): Grew an AI-powered fintech startup to democratize small business lending.
• Director of Engineering, Roku (2014-2021): Scaled international streaming business with AI-driven content recommendations.
• Senior Engineering Manager, Netflix (2011-2014): Delivered innovative user interfaces and transitioned millions to streaming.
• Senior Engineering Manager, Cisco (2009-2011): Assembled a team and developed the full user experience for in-home telepresence video conferencing.
• Engineering Manager, TiVo (2006-2008): Led embedded Linux user interface development to pause, schedule, and record live broadcast television.

• Patents: Developed a TV-centric UI framework for Cisco’s ūmi telepresence product.
• Publications:

  • "Developing .NET Enterprise Applications" (2003)
    

  • "The Complete Guide to Torque X" (2008)
    

    • "Web Services & Java Server Pages" Dr. Dobb's Journal (2002)

    • "Examining OS/2 2.1 Threads" Dr. Dobb's Journal (1994)

• Email: jkanalakis@msn.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnkanalakis

I'm always interested in connecting with professionals passionate about AI, technology, and innovation. Whether you're exploring new ideas, looking for a mentor, or want to discuss cutting-edge tech, feel free to reach out!