Thomas Antonakis
Principal Analytics Engineer @ Kaizen Gaming
Ilioúpoli, Greece
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I’m Thomas Antonakis, and I come from Crete, the most beautiful island in Greece, and among the most beautiful in the world.
I have studied Statistics in Athens for B.Sc. and Master, before starting working in the Data Analysis industry. My first actual experience was a controlling (finance) department in a multinational wholesale company before jumping directly into BI and start/scale-ups. ClickDelivery.gr and efood (members of Delivery Hero) were the next destinations where I spent 6 years in the Greek BI team, 4 of them managing it.
I started working in ORFIUM in March 2021 where I was introduced to the modern data stack and the role of the Analytics Engineer. I became so passionate about the philosophy, the technology and the differentiation of the role from hard-core data analysis, so I got excited and started be following the IC Track in ORFIUM having been promoted to Staff and then Principal BI Engineer.
In July 2025, I assumed the role of Principal Analytics Engineer at Kaizen Gaming where I have the privilege of mentoring and technically leading a team of around 50 Analytics Engineers, empowering them with the community best practices.
I am 40 years old happily married to my lovely wife Melina, and a father of two amazing kids Vassilis and Aurora.
I am also a co-organizer of the Athens dbt meetup (https://www.meetup.com/athens-dbt-meetup/) so feel free to contact me in case you are interested in presenting.
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The Principals’ Framework for Consistent dbt at Scale
At Kaizen Gaming, analytics engineering grew to around 50 engineers across six domain teams, each with different levels of dbt adoption and their own ways of solving similar problems. As principal analytics engineers, we needed to improve consistency without turning central governance into a bottleneck. In this talk, we will share three practical patterns that helped us do that: moving company-wide foundational models into a centrally owned dbt-kzn-core repository, packaging shared macros and tests into a custom internal package named dbt-kzn-utils with automation to propagate standards downstream, and managing dbt Cloud configuration through Terraform with CI guardrails that scope changes to affected projects only. This approach helped us improve developer experience, reduce duplicated effort, and centralize the right responsibilities while keeping domain teams autonomous. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns they can reuse in their own multi-team dbt setup.
Belgium dbt Meetup User group Sessionize Event
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