Kostas Gaitanos
About Kostas Gaitanos
Kostas Gaitanos serves as the Director of Operations at FINRA, where he has significantly improved developer productivity and software development lifecycle control since 2017. He has a strong background in engineering and project management, with a focus on DevOps practices and CI/CD ecosystems.
Work at FINRA
Kostas Gaitanos serves as the Director of Operations at FINRA, a position he has held since 2017. In this role, he has significantly restructured the Enterprise Development Tools organization to enhance developer productivity and improve software development lifecycle (SDLC) control. He has led the transition of the Software Configuration Management (SCM) and Build Engineering practice to a DevOps practice, establishing a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) ecosystem that incorporates various tools and services. His leadership has resulted in over 90% initiative adoption across the enterprise.
Education and Expertise
Kostas Gaitanos has a diverse educational background. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from York University, studying from 1980 to 1986. He pursued a Master's degree in Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto from 1990 to 1993 and later obtained a Master's of Science in Operations Research and Optimization from the University of Guelph between 1986 and 1989. Additionally, he completed a Project Management Certificate at Georgetown University in 2011 and a Python 3 Programming Certificate from the University of Michigan in 2020.
Background
Before his current role at FINRA, Kostas Gaitanos worked as a Senior Director in Application Engineering and Enterprise Development Tools at FINRA from 2006 to 2017. His tenure in this position allowed him to address quality issues within the organization and implement significant changes, including reducing the overall headcount by 20%. He established a high availability infrastructure and improved service request response times to under 48 calendar hours.
Achievements
Kostas Gaitanos has made notable contributions to the Enterprise Development Tools organization at FINRA. He introduced quality metrics to evaluate the quality and speed of services, which has played a key role in enhancing operational efficiency. His efforts in retooling CI/CD processes have facilitated end-to-end delivery pipelines for applications migrating to AWS. These initiatives have positioned the organization to better meet the demands of modern software development.