Nikos Michalakis is the Distinguished Technical Fellow at Woven by Toyota. He is responsible for Woven by Toyota's software-defined vehicle strategy within the new mobility space, which includes collaborating with Arene's teams for vehicle-platform and developer tools such as SDK, simulation, data processing, in addition to ADAS and Woven City teams. He desires to realize the most programmable vehicles on the planet through Arene and the next generation e-platform. He educates Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), its partners, and suppliers on how to bridge the automotive and software cultures to transform the way vehicles are developed.

Nikos joined the Toyota family in 2016 at Toyota Research Institute (TRI) in Silicon Valley as a cloud architect and then Director of the Cloud and Big Data Platform. Prior to Toyota, he was at Netflix's Cloud Platform, the team responsible for services like Eureka, Archaius and Ribbon. There he wrote tools that helped scale the productivity of Netflix engineers and created a curriculum to educate them about microservice architectures.

Before Toyota, Nikos helped develop software and teams in a series of start-ups in a variety of industries, sizes and growth trajectories: a 30-person big data start-up (acquired by Microsoft), an ed-tech start-up that grew from 60 to 200 employees (acquired by Wiley), an online advertising network that grew from 300 to 500 employees (acquired by Amobee) and a cloud provider start-up that grew from 5 to 40 employees. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In his free time, Nikos loves to educate children about software engineering and entrepreneurship through stories and games that he designs, authors and illustrates with his art as DrTechniko. His “How To Train Your Robot” game became such a popular way to get kids started with programming around the world without the need of a computer that it landed him an article in Hacker Monthly and a TEDx talk.