Iason Koukas Greece · Remote

Software engineer building complete products, from backend to app store.

AI-native backends, cross-platform mobile games, and the systems that keep them running in production. Designed, built, shipped and maintained end to end, on the App Store and Google Play since 2016.

155K
lines of hand-written code in Tale Crafting
400+
story turns without memory drift
~20
AI models behind one cost-aware router
13
languages, translated and localized
8
products shipped to the app stores
2016
first App Store release

Featured project

Tale Crafting, an AI story game for iOS and Android.

A mobile role-playing game where every turn is written live by language models, narrated, illustrated and scored with music. The main engineering challenge is keeping a story coherent across hundreds of turns at a sustainable cost per turn.

Tale Crafting home screen with New Story and My Stories buttons over a mountain landscape
A story turn: narrated prose with four suggested actions for the player
A story turn illustrated with generated artwork of three characters around a glowing bell
Tale Crafting app icon

Tale Crafting

iOS and Android · Python backend · Unity client

Story memory engine

Five overlapping mechanisms (vector retrieval over pgvector, hierarchical summaries, a continuously rewritten world bible) keep characters, places and promises consistent past 400 turns.

Model routing and failover

A routing table over about twenty models from a dozen providers picks by capability, maturity rating and price, prices every turn, and fails over when a provider goes down.

Production backend

FastAPI and async SQLAlchemy on Postgres, with deadlock-free ordered locking, optimistic concurrency, an incremental sync protocol, scheduled background jobs and a maintenance gate.

Commerce and media

Credits economy with per-turn cost accounting, Apple and Google purchases with server notifications, narration voices, generated artwork, and music matched from a library of about 1,700 tracks.

Unity clientiOS · Android · 13 languages
Cloudflare + nginxTLS · origin lock
FastAPI serviceasync tasks · WebSocket polling
Postgres + pgvectormemory tree · Alembic migrations
MinIO object storagenarration · artwork · exports
AI providerstext · speech · image · embeddings

Deployed with Docker on a single droplet, with daily backups, certificate renewal, crash reporting and usage analytics. Designed, deployed and operated by one person.

Other projects

Apps on the App Store and Google Play.

Five Unity apps share a common infrastructure layer (purchases, ads, consent, audio, dialogs, analytics) that I built and maintain across all of them. Three more are native Android apps. I keep them current with platform and store requirements.

Lexosynthesis app icon

Lexosynthesis

Word puzzle · English and Greek, two store apps

Fair global competition with no server at all: every player gets identical daily and weekly challenges generated from the week number. Eight leagues, 54 multi-level achievements, a small scripting language for tutorials, and every word you find plays a melody as its letters dissolve.

8
leagues
54
achievements
43
melodies
2
languages
  • Unity · C#
  • SQLite dictionaries
  • Game Center · Play Games
  • 72K lines
Percent app icon

Percent

Greek survey quiz

Four hundred levels and 1,200 questions, half of them created with an AI-assisted pipeline that also finds and fixes weak hints.

  • Unity
  • Java + Python pipeline
  • LLM judging
Wheel of Words app icon

Wheel of Words

Greek word game

A wheel-of-fortune word game in Greek, running on the same shared layer and upgraded alongside its siblings.

  • Unity
  • SimpleSQL
  • AdMob · IAP
Kid Beowulf app icon

Kid Beowulf

Licensed comic and match-3 game

Returning to both stores in 2026: moved to Unity 6, redesigned with the comic’s author, and its sign-in and cloud saves moved to Google Play Games v2.

  • Unity 6
  • Play Games v2
  • Cloud save

Crosswords and Sokoban

Native Android · Java

Crossword Challenges, Greek Crosswords and Sokoban, modernized to current Android. The crossword grids come from my own generator, which repairs dead ends by backtracking, with every clue checked by an AI judge.

  • Java · Gradle
  • Grid generation
  • Play Billing

Approach

Working with AI coding tools.

I use AI coding agents every day, with the discipline I would apply to working in a team: written specifications, review of every change, and documented standards.

  • Specify firstA written design, and the invariants it must keep, before an agent touches the code.
  • Verify before changingAssumptions are checked against the actual code before anything is changed.
  • Care with proven codeChanges to well-tested modules are reviewed against their original design first.
  • Fix the root causeBugs are fixed where they originate, without workarounds that hide them.
  • Documented standardsWritten conventions and project notes keep long-running work consistent.

Experience

Experience and education.

Trained as a computer engineer, I spent my first professional years on command-and-control software for Greece’s emergency services, then went independent to build and run my own products.

  1. 2023 – now

    Tale Crafting

    An AI story RPG for iOS and Android: designed, built, deployed and operated alone.

  2. 2013 – now

    Independent developer

    Started with a daily online crossword, later rebuilt offline because it was simpler to run and more engaging. Then Lexosynthesis, Percent, Wheel of Words and Kid Beowulf on both stores.

  3. 2009 – 2012

    Software engineer, Satways

    Geospatial command-and-control software in Java, used by the fire service, police and emergency medical services. I owned whole modules end to end: a semi-automated reporting tool, a rich-text mail client for messaging inside the platform, a SIP softphone integrated with the call centre, a live grid of camera feeds, and the console that handles every incoming alarm.

  4. 2008 – 2013

    Postgraduate studies, University of Thessaly

    Master’s in Science and Technology of Computers, Telecommunications and Networks, with distinction (over 9/10), completed while working at Satways, within doctoral research on computer-aided optimization of circuit design.

  5. 2007

    Diploma in Computer and Communication Engineering

    Five-year engineering degree, University of Thessaly, Volos.

Skills

Technical skills.

Across the full path of a request: the mobile client, store billing, the API, the database and the AI providers.

Languages

  • C#
  • Python
  • Java
  • C
  • SQL
  • also C++, MATLAB

Backend

  • Python, FastAPI, asyncio
  • SQLAlchemy 2, Alembic
  • Postgres, pgvector
  • MinIO, S3 APIs
  • Docker, nginx, Cloudflare

Applied AI

  • Multi-provider routing and failover
  • Retrieval and embeddings
  • Prompt caching, cost models
  • Speech and image generation
  • Evaluation harnesses

Mobile

  • Unity, C#
  • Native Android, Java, Gradle
  • StoreKit 2, Play Billing
  • AdMob, consent, Firebase
  • Cloud builds, TestFlight

Practice

  • Architecture and data design
  • Release and store compliance
  • Legacy modernization
  • Technical writing
  • AI-directed development

Availability

Open to long-term remote work, part time.

  • About 25 hours a week
  • Long-term deliverables
  • A written report every week
  • English or Greek