An Engineering Career at SoftInWay: Legacy Carried From the Sea to the Sky | Vasileios Pastrikakis’s Story

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Engineering came into Vasileios Pastrikakis‘s life through his father, who spent his career as an engineer on maritime ships. He grew up on stories of how his father could “identify and solve an engine problem while being under pressure,” and those stories planted the initial idea of what his own future could look like. They also gifted him with long lasting values that still guide him today, to work hard, have humility, and always be curious. As Vas began questioning what he wanted to do with his life, he chose to carry those lessons somewhere his father had never sailed.

Figure 1: Vasileios Pastrikakis at graduation with his sister

A Different Kind of Engineering Career

His father chased problems across the open water. Vas went looking for them in the sky. “I wanted to make my own path” he says. He found it in propulsion — or as he puts it, “the heart of every aircraft and spacecraft.”

So, he pursued a PhD in rotorcraft aerodynamics, then spent a couple of years working on fixed-wing aircraft projects before propulsion pulled him in for good. It was an entirely different industry from his father’s, but the instincts were the same ones he’d learned as a kid. Stay calm, find the problem, and solve it properly, no matter the pressure.

Learning to Build, Not Just Design

While working on propulsion, Vasileios grew curious about the business behind the engineering, so he pursued an MBA alongside his technical work.

“I wanted to understand not only how great products are engineered, but also how successful companies grow, how teams are built, and how innovation is commercialized,” he explains.

That combination is what brought him to SoftInWay, where he was offered “the chance to solve complex engineering challenges while learning how a technology company grows, supports customers and turns innovation into real-world impact.”

It was the perfect combination for Vas, and though he didn’t know it yet, this was the start of what would come to feel like a second family.

Figure 2: Vasileios presenting at Turbo Expo representing SoftInWay

The Beginning of Something Big

Vas still remembers exactly when he realized SoftInWay was building something much larger than just AxSTREAM, a specialized holistic turbomachinery design platform. About eight years ago, his business and engineering expertise made him the bridge connecting customers to software. It was there that he landed his first space startup customer, an ambitious rocket engine project that arrived right at the start of Europe’s commercial space boom.

“It became clear to me that we weren’t simply selling engineering software, we were helping ambitious companies accelerate innovation and bring new technologies to life,” he says.

Since then, he’s supported dozens of organizations across space, aerospace, and defense. He says watching them grow has been one of the most rewarding parts of his career.

That first startup project also sparked the ambition that drives his work every day, to make SoftInWay the company all engineers turn to when nobody else has an answer.

Home, and a New Chapter for the UK SoftInWay Team

Not every defining decision in Vas’s career was a technical one. While originally based at SoftInWay Switzerland, personal circumstances meant he and his family needed to move back to England, but it wasn’t a decision he had to make alone. “SoftInWay supported that decision, and together we saw it as an opportunity to establish and grow a stronger presence in the UK,” he says. “Looking back several years later, that decision proved to be the right one.”

Ten years later, Vas leads as SoftInWay’s UK Managing Director, watching that presence grow.

“It’s incredibly rewarding to see how a personal decision evolved into something that also created lasting value for the company,” he says.

Figure 3: Vasileios and Sherry Deng (SoftInWay Engineering Consultant in the UK) at the Farnborough Airshow 2026

What Comes Next

Today, Vas is working on what he calls the most exciting project of his career: an innovative propulsion system unlike anything ever developed before. He can’t share the details yet, but the shape of the challenge is a familiar one that requires the same instinct he learned as a kid, to stay calm, find the problem, solve it properly, no matter the pressure. Only now the timelines are more ambitious with harder constraints.

“Those constraints force us to think differently, question assumptions, and innovate every single day,” he says.

It’s not so different, in the end, from the pressure his father used to face at sea, except now it’s Vasileios leading the team that has to find the answer.

What drives him now is the same thing that shaped him back then: his family. He wants to give his own wife and children the kind of future his parents worked to give him, built on the same hard work, humility, and curiosity they passed down. That instinct never stayed confined to home, and it’s the same one that turned SoftInWay into a second family.

Figure 4: Vasileios at a conference working at SoftInWay

Vasileios’s story is a reminder that the instincts we learn as kids don’t always stay where we learned them. Sometimes they’re carried sideways, into an industry no one expected, and into a second family we didn’t know we’d find.

At SoftInWay, legacy lives here.