What I do

My expertise is the meta-skill of building world-class products where none existed before. I have a repeatable playbook for 0-to-1 innovation, which I have successfully applied four times to create foundational technologies across diverse domains (from analog CAD to distributed ledgers).

My method is to architect elite, high-performance teams and foster the specific culture required to solve intractable problems and deliver breakthrough results. My playbook has been:

  1. Identifying an impossible, "0-to-1" problem.
  2. Attracting and identifying the "gladiator" level talent required.
  3. Building the "bubble of orchestrated genius" around them.
  4. Leading that bubble to a world-first outcome.
My application domains have been (reverse chronological):
  • Real-time, distributed sensor based, industrial incident workflows (Head of Software at Distran AG and Senior Technical Advisor at Omnisens SA).
  • Privacy-preserving distributed ledger technology with contractual rights & obligations and trustful transport protocol (CTO at Elevence Digital Finance, Head of Research at Digital Asset).
  • Automated derivative market making (and taking), exchange connectivity, low-latency quant stuff (CTO at Actant AG).
  • Hybrid mesh and graph based simulation, semiconductor device simulation TCAD (PhD, Director Device Simulation at ISE AG).
  • Automated analog layout CAD/EDA (Head of Layout-Verification at CSEM).
My expertise domains:
  • LLM Prompting: I put deeper formal models into prompt stacks.
  • Agile management: CTO, Product Owner, Scrum Master, team member.
  • Software Architecture: DSLs (many), distributed systems (mostly in finance), strong integrity, hard real-time, formal properties.
  • Functional Programming: Python, Haskell, Scala, C++ templates.
  • Applied Math: Continuous and combinatorial optimization, optimal control, derivative pricing, mesh and graph based simulation, computational geometry, geometrical algebra, formal systems. I am a structuralist when it comes to math.
  • High-Performance Computing (HPC): Jax, C++, Cuda, Fortran
I mentor professionals and students in innovation, agile methods, and the art of getting ahead in high-tech.

James, are you a genius? a colleague once asked me.
No, no! I would be crazy if I were, was my response. 

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2025.