Spyros Zafeiropoulos

My career began in control systems and autonomous vehicles: research at Georgia Tech and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, then at Delphi (now Aptiv), designing ADAS architectures and radar perception that went into production vehicles. That pattern repeated throughout my career: Allegion brought me in as Principal Engineer specifically to take algorithms research from proof of concept to shipped product, the same capability AeroVect later hired me to lead as VP of Engineering.

Since then I've led engineering at every scale: a global algorithms group of 250+ engineers across seven sites at Aptiv, simulation teams at Cruise, and the full engineering organization at AeroVect, where we grew from 12 to 65+ engineers and modernized the autonomy stack with transformer-based perception, simulation at scale and a data-driven development loop. What makes that combination work is depth in three different modes at once — academic research, industrial R&D and product development — not just one of them.

Along the way I learned that the most complex system isn't the code or the hardware. It's the people building it. I've mentored engineers and leaders through official programs since 2018, and in 2020 I started STEPS to coach engineering professionals and startups independently. Today STEPS is how I do that work: coaching, fractional leadership and advisory.