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The agenda is subject to change as sessions are confirmed

Day 1 – November 9, 2026
Day 2 – November 10, 2026

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Main Stage
08:00–09:15

Registration and refreshments

09:15

Talk

Introduction from your host: Pat Kua

A welcome from the host.

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Talk

Introduction from your host: Pat Kua

09:15 – 09:40

A welcome from the host.
09:40

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Welcome address: Code Your Future

Join CodeYourFuture as they welcome you to LeadDev Berlin 2026 and kick off two days of learning, conversations, and connections with fellow engineering leaders.

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Talk

Welcome address: Code Your Future

09:40 – 09:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Tech NGO partner:

CodeYourFuture LeadDev

Join CodeYourFuture as they welcome you to LeadDev Berlin 2026 and kick off two days of learning, conversations, and connections with fellow engineering leaders.

  • FEATURING
    Germán Bencci
    Founder & CEOCodeYourFuture

    Germán is the founder of CodeYourFuture, a community-led organization offering inclusive software development training to people from refugee and low-income backgrounds. In doing so, CodeYourFuture enables individuals to start thriving careers in the tech industry. Previously, Germán held roles in Open Innovation, produced artistic events and managed fundraising campaigns. He holds degrees in Electronics Engineering and Comparative Literature.

    View Germán ‘s profile
09:45

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+

Escaping the AI speed trap

Move beyond token spend and code volume to measure AI’s impact on decisions, learning, and organizational capacity.

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Talk

Escaping the AI speed trap

09:45 – 10:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+

Developers write over 25x more code with AI, and faster than ever before. But most organisations still can’t see concrete value from agentic development. That’s the AI speed trap: adoption, token usage, and delivery speed skyrocket while revenue and other business metrics stay flat. Join Laura Tacho, Head of AWS Builder Research, to escape it. You’ll learn how to tell whether you’re stuck, with AI metrics you can use in your next leadership meeting. Then you’ll learn two ways to increase your agentic ROI: using tokens more efficiently so you keep budgets in check, and increasing value delivery, not just generating more lines code. Laura will share how real companies are turning AI into stronger organisational performance at scale: better decisions, faster learning, efficient token consumption, and features customers actually care about.

  • FEATURING
    Laura Tacho
    Senior Principal TechnologistAWS
    Laura Tacho is a subject matter expert in measuring the efficiency of engineering organizations. Currently, she is a Senior Principal Technologist at AWS focusing on developer experience and AI-native development. Laura was previously the CTO of DX, where she led the company’s executive advisory and research programs. She is the co-author of the Core 4 Framework of Developer Productivity, used by companies like LEGO, Netflix, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Snowflake to measure and improve developer experience. In 2025, she was awarded Austrian Innovator of the Year. Laura’s been working on developer tools for 15 years, including building out some of the first developer tools for the Docker ecosystem.
    View Laura ‘s profile
10:15

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+

Shipping AI products that pay off: Lessons from the messy middle

Turn promising AI demos into reliable products through shared infrastructure, embedded evaluation, and business-focused experimentation.

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Talk

Shipping AI products that pay off: Lessons from the messy middle

10:15 – 10:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+

Discover how building an AI platform and driving cultural change helped Personio go from flashy hackathon demos to AI products that pay off.

The gap between a flashy demo and an AI product that pays off is full of work nobody talks about. At Personio, we discovered this the hard way.

Our VP of Data, Systems and AI gave us a mandate to embed AI into how we work. We ran a hackathon, shipped MVPs of internal AI products, and got genuine excitement from stakeholders. 6 months later, adoption was near zero, and the products that did get used led to an unexpected spike in LLM token spend.

Then came the question every leader is getting from the CEO or board: where do the returns of our AI spend show up in the financial statement?

As a Staff Data Scientist leading AI and data product development at Personio, I had to find a way to drive change without authority.

I will share what we actually did: embedding agent evaluations in the team’s workflow, increasing the org’s velocity and then the company’s decision velocity, and building a shared AI platform so the team could build on each other’s work rather than starting from scratch.

Key takeaways

  • What it takes to go from flashy AI demo to a finished product your users will love
  • How to influence your org for deeper AI investment through early imperfect projects
  • Practical techniques for evaluating AI products against business value
10:45

Talk

Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

When learning goes quiet: Mentoring in the age of AI

Practical ways to distinguish AI-assisted productivity from genuine understanding and mentor engineers toward lasting competence.

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Talk

When learning goes quiet: Mentoring in the age of AI

10:45 – 10:55

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

AI helps engineers ship faster, but makes learning harder to see. How do leaders mentor, assess growth, and build real competence when output no longer reflects understanding?

AI is creating a dangerous illusion: developers are shipping faster while learning less visibly. We’ve long relied on signals like questions, iteration, independence, and output to understand how engineers grow. But in an AI-assisted world, many of those signals are disappearing.

As someone leading teams using AI daily, I’ve seen this shift go both brilliantly and badly.

Some engineers accelerate their learning dramatically using AI to explore unfamiliar systems, test ideas, and build confidence faster than ever. Others become highly productive while quietly accumulating gaps in understanding that only surface later: in fragile decisions, unclear reasoning, or an inability to debug when things go wrong.

The challenge for engineering leaders is that the learning process itself is becoming harder to see.

Where junior developers once asked questions throughout their work, exposing their thinking as they went, managers now increasingly see only the final output: a polished pull request. When productivity no longer reflects competence, how do we know whether someone is growing or just generating?

This talk explores how AI is reshaping developer learning and what engineering leaders need to do differently in response.

Together we’ll explore questions many leaders are already wrestling with:

  • When engineers stop asking questions, what signal replaces them?
  • How do you distinguish AI-assisted output from real understanding?
  • What new blind spots appear when managers only see the pull request?
  • How do you coach deeper engineering judgment, not just faster delivery?
  • And how do you create teams where learning stays visible?

Leaders will leave with practical approaches for mentoring, feedback, and capability-building in AI-enabled teams, helping engineers develop real competence, not just AI-assisted productivity.

Key takeaways

  • Recognise why traditional signals of engineering growth become less reliable in AI-assisted teams.
  • Learn how to distinguish AI-assisted productivity from genuine understanding and capability.
  • Identify new ways to make learning visible when managers only see the pull request.
  • Adapt mentoring and feedback to build engineering judgment, not just faster delivery.
  • Spot the warning signs of hidden capability gaps before they become team risks.”
  • FEATURING
    Becki Wordsworth
    CTOMeela

    Becki Wordsworth is a Software Developer and Engineering Leader who is passionate about building high-performing teams and helping engineers grow. With experience leading teams through periods of rapid technical change, she focuses on mentoring, capability-building, and creating environments where people can do their best work. Becki is particularly interested in how AI is reshaping software development, engineering culture, and the way developers learn – helping leaders adapt without losing sight of deep technical understanding and long-term growth.

    View Becki’s profile
10:55–11:40

Morning Break

11:40

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Leading through the AI shift: Platform, reliability and security

More details coming soon.

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Talk

Leading through the AI shift: Platform, reliability and security

11:40 – 12:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Meri is CTO, coach, advisor, have been chairing all LeadDev events for over 10 years. Join their talk as they will bring their view to leading through the AI shift, with a focus on platform engineering, incident management, reliability, quality and security.

More details of the talk coming soon.

  • FEATURING
    Meri Williams
    CTO, NED & AdvisorChromeRose

    Meri is an experienced CTO and leader of technology organisations. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers of organizations by working as a CTO coach and tech advisor / NED to various companies in this capacity through micro-consultancy ChromeRose.

    They have led teams ranging in size from 30 to 300, in a range of organizations from Procter & Gamble, to the Government Digital Service, award-winning online print company MOO, mobile-first challenger bank Monzo and patient-inspired AI-driven rare disease treatment discovery company Healx, amongst others.

    Together with their wife, they run the micro-charity One Goes Up, which supports young women and non-binary folks in pursuing STEM education and careers.

    View Meri’s profile
12:10

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

After the agents write the code

Discover how CodeRabbit cleared four critical bottlenecks to ship 10x more software with AI agents, without compromising quality or security.

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Talk

After the agents write the code

12:10 – 12:40

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

CodeRabbit

A field report from 100 million code reviews on what it takes to ship at agentic speed. CodeRabbit cleared four bottlenecks and now ships 10x more software without adding engineering headcount. David Loker shows how.

What does it take to move from human-centered software development to fully agentic development, so you can ship dramatically faster without sacrificing quality or security?

At CodeRabbit, we have run 100 million code reviews, so we see where teams get stuck. The teams we work with are solving agentic coding, but not yet agentic shipping. Now that code is cheap to write, four things have become bottlenecks: review, understanding, prioritization, and security.

We hit all four. We cleared them, and that is how we now ship 10x more software without adding engineering headcount.
David Loker, VP of Applied AI at CodeRabbit, shows how. He walks through the four practices that helped us, one for each bottleneck: an adversarial review loop, explainability, a prioritization system, and constant security on new and existing code. He explains how our workflows, roles, and responsibilities changed, and why shipping at agentic speed comes down to trust, built on purpose. You will leave with a plan for where to start and how to measure progress.

Key takeaways

  • Find the bottleneck holding your team back today: review, understanding, prioritization, or security. Judge your coding agents by how much of their work you can trust, not by how much they can do on their own.
  • Build one practice for each bottleneck: an adversarial review loop, explainability, a prioritization system, and constant security on new and existing code.
  • Change how work flows and who does what. Let most changes merge after an independent check, send the changes with the most value and risk to a person, and make designing that system a leader’s job. Measure progress by how often merged changes get rolled back.
  • FEATURING
    David Loker
    VP of AICodeRabbit

    David Loker is the VP of AI at CodeRabbit, where he leads the development of agentic AI systems that transform code reviews and developer workflows. As an entrepreneur and award-winning researcher, he has been building large-scale machine learning and AI systems since 2007 and coding since childhood. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles in leading conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, and AAAI, and was an early pioneer in generative AI. From founding startups to hands-on engineering, David brings deep technical rigor and product-oriented vision, driving applied AI innovations that bridge cutting-edge research and real-world value.

    View David’s profile
12:40

Talk

Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Burnout: A team failure mode

Reframe burnout as a systems failure and apply SRE principles to build sustainable, high-performing engineering teams.

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Talk

Burnout: A team failure mode

12:40 – 13:10

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

This talk reframes burnout as a systems failure and applies SRE principles to design sustainable, high-performing engineering teams.

Is your team’s health as observable as your software?

High-performing engineering teams are celebrated for their velocity and “whatever it takes” commitment. Yet, these same traits often make them the most vulnerable to a predictable, systemic failure mode: burnout.

This isn’t a lack of individual grit; it’s a design flaw. When we architect software for 99.9% uptime but run our teams at 100% capacity, we create a system with zero fault tolerance. In this talk, we move beyond the superficial “resiliency” narrative and analyze team health through the lens of systems engineering.

We will explore how to apply SRE principles (like load shedding, redundancy mechanisms, and leading indicators) to the human element of the stack. You’ll learn why “idle capacity” is the secret to low latency, how to make cognitive load visible, and how to build a system where high performance doesn’t require a “hero culture” destined for a catastrophic outage.

Key takeaways

  • Burnout is a systems failure, not a people problem.
  • High performance requires slack, not heroics.
  • Boundaries only work when the system enforces them.
  • FEATURING
    Diana Nanuti
    Senior Software EngineerChainalysis

    Diana Nanuti is a Senior Software Engineer at Chainalysis and a 2025 UK Gold Winner at the Women in Tech Global Awards. She specializes in cloud infrastructure and data engineering, building resilient, mission-critical blockchain intelligence systems used by global financial institutions and law enforcement. Her work focuses on secure, high-reliability cloud-native platforms. Beyond engineering, Diana is a speaker and mentor advocating for sustainable high performance, psychological safety, and burnout prevention, helping teams balance delivery with long-term well-being.

    View Diana’s profile
13:10–14:40

Lunch Break

14:40

The Big Debate

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Are we measuring what AI produces, or just how much of it we’re using?

Series of high level debates on unresolved questions in modern engineering.

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The Big Debate

Are we measuring what AI produces, or just how much of it we’re using?

14:40 – 15:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Engineering is being reshaped in real time.

AI isn’t just another tool in the stack – it’s changing how teams are structured, how leaders lead, how juniors learn, and how software is built at scale. While the industry is still finding its feet and before any frameworks can claim to be “battle tested”, there exists a huge diversity of thought about how to create the golden path forward. 

The Big Debate is a series of high-level discussions that gets to the heart of this- tackling the most urgent, unresolved questions in modern engineering.

This is a chance to listen in as a trio of industry experts at the cutting edge share how they’re thinking about what comes next. 

Join these sessions to hear how some of the most forward-thinking leaders in the industry are debating, designing, and defining the future of engineering.

  • FEATURING
    Brenn Hill
    Sr. Data Science, MLE, DE ManagerDelivery Hero

    Brenn has nearly 20 years in the industry and is the author of The Delivery Gap, a book on AI adoption for enterprise, the BRACE AI security framework, as well as multiple open source tools. He is Sr DS/MLE/DE Manager at Delivery Hero in Berlin. Previously he was Head of Engineering for VNG, Vietnam’s first Unicorn startup, and CTO of Leflair, an e-commerce startup that scaled to $20m ARR.

    View Brenn’s profile
  • Kimberly Schmitt
    Engineering ManagerDeepL

    Kimberly Schmitt is an Engineering Manager at DeepL, where she leads the team that develops foundational data products to drive efficient product development and operational efforts. The team prioritises the creation of AI automations and tools for data discovery and action and is leading efforts to define and assess AI effectiveness across DeepL.

    Before DeepL, she built and led the B2B data platform at Babbel and has a background in building data infrastructure for social impact.

    Kimberly has spoken on engineering leadership, team development, and the human dimensions of AI adoption. Her focus is on the engineers already on your team — and what it actually takes to develop them in a fast-changing environment.

    View Kimberly’s profile
  • Laura Tacho
    Senior Principal TechnologistAWS
    Laura Tacho is a subject matter expert in measuring the efficiency of engineering organizations. Currently, she is a Senior Principal Technologist at AWS focusing on developer experience and AI-native development. Laura was previously the CTO of DX, where she led the company’s executive advisory and research programs. She is the co-author of the Core 4 Framework of Developer Productivity, used by companies like LEGO, Netflix, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Snowflake to measure and improve developer experience. In 2025, she was awarded Austrian Innovator of the Year. Laura’s been working on developer tools for 15 years, including building out some of the first developer tools for the Docker ecosystem.
    View Laura ‘s profile
  • Randy Shoup
    SVP EngineeringThrive Market

    Randy Shoup serves as SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market. With more than 30 years of experience building distributed systems and leading high-performing teams, he has held senior technology leadership roles at eBay, Google, Stitch Fix, and WeWork. He also mentors CTOs, advises organizations, and shares his perspectives widely. A frequent conference speaker on software and engineering leadership, he is particularly interested in how culture, technology, and organizational design intersect.

    View Randy’s profile
15:20

Talk

Director+•Staff+

What successful engineering organizations do differently with AI

Learn how leading engineering organizations measure AI ROI, improve team effectiveness, and turn growing AI investments into business value.

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Talk

What successful engineering organizations do differently with AI

15:20 – 15:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Staff+

Sponsored by:

Swarmia

AI is getting more expensive. Learn what the best engineering organizations do to make sure the spend pays off.

In many companies, AI spend already equals 20% of fully loaded headcount cost, and it’s only going to grow. That money buys real speed for individual engineers. But faster coding doesn’t automatically make an organization better at delivering software, and most teams have no clear way to tell whether the extra cost is paying off.

In this talk, Roman Musatkin, Head of Product & Design at Swarmia, shares what the most effective engineering organizations are doing differently. They’re building the system that builds the product: raising how much you can safely hand to agents, changing how teams work, and keeping quality high as more code and more actors move through the codebase.

He’ll introduce Swarmia’s Build framework, a practical way to look at AI leverage, engineering effectiveness, and return on engineering together, so you can make sure you’re focusing on what matters instead of chasing vanity metrics.

Key takeaways

You’ll walk away with:

  • A practical framework that contains three questions that matter: are we creating the conditions for AI to succeed, are we delivering value faster and sustainably, and what business value is all this engineering producing.
  • A concrete way to measure whether your AI spend is justified, including cost per pull request and AI cost per engineer, so you can bring a real number to your next budgeting conversation.
  • Three culture shifts you can try right away: prototype an end-to-end version before you prioritize, hand engineers open-ended problems instead of finished specs, and run small live sessions where product, design, and engineering build together instead of in sequence.
  • FEATURING
    Roman Musatkin
    Head of Product & DesignSwarmia

    Roman is the Head of Product & Design at Swarmia, an engineering intelligence platform for modern software organizations. Working at the intersection of design, product, and engineering, Roman focuses on helping engineering organizations from startups to enterprises build better software faster. Before Swarmia, Roman led design at Smartly.io.

    View Roman ‘s profile
15:30

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

The hallucination crisis: Who owns agentic AI outcomes in production?

An AI hallucination exposed a critical accountability gap and inspired a governance playbook for safely deploying high-stakes automation.

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Talk

The hallucination crisis: Who owns agentic AI outcomes in production?

15:30 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Tech Lead

When a production AI agent hallucinated, the true crisis wasn’t technical—it was organizational. Discover the battle-tested governance playbook we built to map accountability and safely deploy high-stakes automation anywhere.

Every engineering leader has shipped something that kept them up at night. In most industries, a bad release means a degraded UI or a temporary drop in conversion metrics. In healthcare, it means something else entirely.

This case study details the rollout of AI agents into clinical workflows handling prior authorizations, discharge summaries, and medication triage across more than 2 million patient interactions annually. Built on AWS Agent Core with Agent Squad orchestration across specialised clinical agents, the architecture was sound — the ownership model was not.

Three weeks into production, a discharge-summary agent hallucinated a medication continuation instruction. No patient was harmed, but the fallout was immediate: clinicians lost confidence, overrides skyrocketed, and our engineering teams entered a finger-pointing loop. Platform engineering, ML, and clinical operations had all assumed someone else held final escalation authority. Nobody did.

This talk shares the operating playbook we built to pull our AI system out of crisis and back into production safely — and more importantly, to make sure we never ended up in that room again. We’ll cover how we drew strict ownership boundaries for agentic systems where no single service owns the full outcome, how we engineered human-in-the-loop patterns that preserve genuine accountability without becoming rubber stamps, and how we rebuilt clinical trust through review structures that gave humans meaningful control rather than the illusion of it.

The governance framework that came out of this incident has since been adopted by two teams outside healthcare entirely — because it turns out, regulated AI is just a more honest version of the AI governance problem every engineering leader is quietly avoiding.
You do not need to work in healthcare for this talk to matter- this is a blueprint for any leader deploying high-stakes automation.

Key takeaways

  • A reusable playbook for defining escalation authority before an incident forces the conversation.
  • A decision-ownership model for agentic systems where multiple specialised agents share a workflow but no single service owns the final outcome.
  • A governance structure for regulated AI that gets systems out of endless pilot phases and back into production with organisational sign-off.
  • A trust-rebuild framework for restoring stakeholder confidence after a high-stakes AI incident — applicable far beyond healthcare.
  • A human-in-the-loop design pattern that preserves genuine clinical accountability without collapsing into rubber-stamp override behaviour at scale.
  • FEATURING
    Sibani Mishra
    Senior Manager, AI/ML EngineeringOptum

    Sibani Mishra is a Senior Manager of AI/ML Engineering with 11 years of experience architecting, scaling, and governing enterprise intelligent systems. A multi-cloud certified AI expert, she has spent over a decade leading high-impact engineering initiatives within Fortune 50 companies. Sibani specializes in bridging the gap between advanced data science and enterprise-grade cloud architecture, focusing heavily on moving complex generative AI and multi-agent systems out of sandbox pilots and safely into regulated production environments. Passionate about team topologies and operational excellence, she focuses on defining the next generation of engineering leadership playbooks for probabilistic software.

    View Sibani’s profile
16:00–16:45

Afternoon Break

16:45

Talk

Experienced Manager•New Manager

How to actually change team culture

Discover a practical framework for reshaping team culture through intentional changes to people, processes, and everyday interactions.

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Talk

How to actually change team culture

16:45 – 17:15

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager New Manager

Culture can’t be mandated – it emerges from repeated interactions. This talk shares an experience-based framework for deliberately reshaping team dynamics through intentional changes related to people, processes, and behaviours.

Team culture is one of the most cited – yet least clearly understood – levers in engineering leadership. Everyone wants to change it; few have a clear model for how.

This talk starts with a simple, but powerful, reframe: culture is not values on a wall or a collection of team rituals. It is a pattern of repeated interactions that emerges from the interplay of people and processes. You can’t mandate or declare it with a slogan – but you can be deliberate about changing it.

Using a graph analogy, we model a team as a network, where people and processes are nodes, interactions are edges, and trust is the weight on those edges. This turns culture change from a vague aspiration into a set of concrete interventions:

  • introduce structural nodes (new processes and people that create desired interactions)
  • remove or reshape high-impact nodes (blockers, misalignments, or overloaded connectors)
  • reinforce edges (through conscious choices about what to praise, tolerate, challenge, or ignore).

This isn’t theory. Over three years leading an engineering team responsible for one of Bloomberg’s core products, I applied this framework systematically to reshape a team facing common scaling challenges: context with fragmented ownership, uneven collaboration patterns, and a slowed hiring pipeline. Through deliberate changes to both team composition and process design, we reshaped interaction patterns across the group.

You’ll leave with:

  • a mental model for diagnosing your team’s culture
  • a practical, repeatable framework for influencing it
  • and a realistic understanding that culture change is non-linear – patience matters as much as intent.

The magic formula: Values → Structure → Repeated Interactions → Culture

Key takeaways

  • Culture is shaped by repeated interactions, not declarations. It’s a function of both people and processes – change either, and you change the culture.
  • Design for behaviour, don’t ask for it. You can’t tell people to collaborate more – but you can create an environment where collaboration is the default path.
  • Leaders develop culture through everyday decisions. What you praise, tolerate, challenge, or ignore defines what’s truly expected.
  • Culture change is non-linear. Progress comes in bursts and plateaus – expect doubt during flat periods, and plan for it.
  • FEATURING
    Serg Kravchenko
    Engineering Team LeaderBloomberg

    Serg is an Engineering Team Leader at Bloomberg, where he leads the team behind one of the Bloomberg Terminal’s core products. With six years in engineering leadership – which began during the COVID lockdown – he grew into the role from a software engineering background, and discovered an interest in people and teams through the interviewing and hiring process. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. Outside of work, Serg keeps firmly away from keyboard: knitting, sailing, swimming, stargazing, and reading.

    View Serg’s profile
17:15

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

3‑step mental fitness for engineering leaders

A practical mental fitness framework to help engineering leaders reduce stress, build resilience, and lead their teams more sustainably.

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Talk

3‑step mental fitness for engineering leaders

17:15 – 17:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

A former software engineer turned mental fitness coach shows engineering leaders a simple 3-step practice to reduce stress, boost resilience, and model healthier performance for their teams.

Engineering leaders optimise systems every day, yet few are taught how to manage their inner voice under pressure: the self-doubt, the overthinking, the fear of being “found out”. On top of these, the cognitive load of running complex systems, making high-stakes decisions, and supporting people through change makes leaders especially prone to anxiety, stress, and burnout.

The default response is often “keep pushing,” which quietly normalises overwork and gradually impacts productivity.

As a former software engineer, certified therapist, and mental fitness coach, I speak the language of engineering. I translate neuroscience-backed mental fitness into concepts that feel familiar: operating systems, cognitive bugs, performance bottlenecks, and resilience as a feature, not a luxury.

Mental fitness, based on breakthrough research in Positive Intelligence, is your capacity to face challenges with resilience and positivity, and to model that for your team.

In this talk, I share my own story: how I went from relying on faulty logic, loops of overthinking, and depression, to “debugging my mind” by harmonising both the analytical and the creative, empathic parts of my brain.

I then present a simple, systematic 3-step mental fitness practice tailored for engineering leaders:

  1. Monitoring – running diagnostics on your own system: noticing body signals and background thoughts before they spill over into your leadership.
  2. Debugging – catching your “saboteurs” (habitual negative thought patterns), and understanding how they show up in 1:1s, decision-making, and conflict.
  3. Regular updates – writing your own “mental patch”: reframing saboteur lies into wiser responses, and using micro-practices to stay grounded in tough conversations.

The session blends candid personal story with practical techniques leaders can use immediately to reduce stress, make clearer decisions, and create a healthier performance culture.

You’ll walk away with a clear 3-step framework, tools to intercept sabotaging thought patterns, and a mindset shift: treating your own mental fitness as a lever for team performance, not an individual luxury.

Key takeaways

  • A simple 3-step mental fitness framework (Monitoring, Debugging, Regular Updates) tailored for engineering leaders to reduce stress and sustainably boost their own and team’s performance.
  • A way to spot and intercept “saboteur” thought patterns that hijack leadership before they impact the team (e.g. over-controlling and overworking, to people-pleasing)
  • Practical micro-practices to stay calm, clear-headed, and focused in everyday work: between meetings, during 1:1s, or while code compiles
  • A mindset shift that treats your mental fitness as a core leadership skill and a lever for team performance, not a nice-to-have wellness extra.
  • FEATURING
    Irene Anggreeni
    Mental Fitness CoachWhole Person Leaders

    Irene Anggreeni started out as a software engineer. Today she is a mental fitness coach and trainer, helping engineering leaders and their teams perform under pressure without burning out. She holds a PhD in Industrial Design Engineering and a clinical Master’s in Dance Movement Therapy. Her habit of debugging systems now applies to human ones. A TEDx speaker, Irene translates neuroscience-backed mental fitness into language engineers trust: monitoring, debugging, regular updates. Originally from Indonesia and now based in Rotterdam, she coaches leaders across Europe.

    View Irene’s profile
17:25

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

AI-powered code review at scale

Discover how one team scaled trusted AI code review across 200+ engineers for just $200 a month.

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Talk

AI-powered code review at scale

17:25 – 17:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

How we scaled review quality across 200+ engineers with AI instead of more reviewers — the build-vs-buy call, company-specific rules, the cost story, and the adoption fight.

Code review doesn’t scale linearly with headcount. At 200+ engineers it becomes the single biggest delivery bottleneck — senior engineers burning a third of their time on the same repeated comments, and a handful of domain experts becoming gatekeepers for whole feature areas. This is the case study of how we scaled review quality with AI instead of more reviewers.

It’s a leadership story as much as a technical one. We start with the build-versus-buy decision: we evaluated four AI review tools, and the honest twist is that our formal evaluation’s winner wasn’t what we shipped — the eval was right about features and wrong about what mattered in production. From there: building a custom integration layer when no off-the-shelf tool fit, encoding our own security and architecture standards into the AI so its feedback earned trust, and running the whole thing at roughly $200/month against $40–80K/year SaaS quotes.

The hardest part wasn’t the technology — it was adoption. I’ll cover how we measured whether the AI’s comments were actually helpful (a simple feedback loop), and the moment we knew it worked: another team adopted the system on their own, with no mandate from leadership. Attendees leave with a practical framework for introducing AI into their review process — what to automate, what to keep human, how to measure it, and how to drive adoption across an organisation that’s seen plenty of tools come and go.

Key takeaways

  • A build-versus-buy framework for AI code review — and why the “best” tool on paper may not be the one you ship.
  • How to encode your own security and architecture standards into AI review so engineers actually trust it.
  • How to run AI code review at scale for ~$200/month instead of $40–80K/year.
  • How to measure whether AI feedback is genuinely helpful, with a lightweight feedback loop.
  • What organic, un-mandated adoption by another team tells you about a tool’s real value.
  • FEATURING
    Serhii Yakovenko
    Software Engineering ManagerMarks & Spencer

    Serhii Yakovenko is a software engineering manager based in London, with over a decade in tech spanning QA and SDET roles through engineering leadership at Toptal, Groupon, and now Marks & Spencer. He builds the developer infrastructure that lets large engineering organisations move fast without sacrificing quality — AI-powered code review, LLM-based flaky-test detection, and CI at scale. He focuses on turning LLMs from demos into trusted production infrastructure — and the build-versus-buy, cost, and adoption decisions that come with it.

    View Serhii’s profile
17:55

Talk

End of day wrap-up

Closing thoughts from the host, Pat Kua.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

17:55 – 18:00

Closing thoughts from the host, Pat Kua.
18:00

Networking Mixer

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Networking mixer

Wrap up the day over drinks, meet fellow engineering leaders, swap stories, and make new connections in a relaxed setting.

+ More

Networking Mixer

Networking mixer

18:00 – 19:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Google x LeadDev

Join us for a drink and a chat as we wrap up the day! Catch up with familiar faces, meet new people, swap stories, and share your favorite moments from the day in a relaxed, friendly setting.
WORKSHOP Zone
10:55

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Influencing without authority

A hands-on workshop to help engineering leaders influence decisions, align stakeholders, and move work forward without direct authority.

+ More

Workshop

Influencing without authority

10:55 – 12:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

A hands-on lab for engineering leaders. We’ll work through the messiness of getting things done when you don’t have direct authority — translating technical reality for execs, negotiating across functions, and getting decisions unstuck. You’ll leave with some templates and a rough influence plan you can actually use.

  • FEATURING
    Kaushik Chaubal
    Senior Engineering DirectorBlackRock

    Kaushik Chaubal is a Senior Engineering Director at BlackRock. He is the global head for Liquidity Automation Engineering within Investor Solutions at BlackRock. In the last decade and a half, he has led multiple teams across Product, Platform and Data Engineering, including leading the strategic AI Centre of Excellence.

    View Kaushik’s profile
10:55

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Fundamentals of distributed system resilience

Build foundational knowledge to design resilient distributed systems and navigate the many ways they can fail.

  • Sam Newman Sam Newman & Associates
    Independent Tech Consultant & Author
+ More

Workshop

Fundamentals of distributed system resilience

10:55 – 12:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

O'Reilly x LeadDev

Distributed systems are all around us. You are probably building one without realising it! What is it about distributed systems that makes them painful to deal with? And how can you make sure the systems you create are resilient in the face of the myriad ways in which they can fail?

In this workshop with Sam Newman, you will explore the nature of resilience in the context of distributed systems, and come away with some foundational knowledge that will help you no matter what type of system you are building.

Please note, this is not a coding workshop – it is a discussion-based workshop where as a group we explore architectural and technical aspects. Laptops are totally optional!

  • FEATURING
    Sam Newman
    Independent Tech Consultant & AuthorSam Newman & Associates
    Sam Newman is an independent consultant who loves solving problems with technology. Focusing primarily in the areas of cloud, microservice architecture and continuous delivery, Sam works with companies big and small all over the world. He is also an experienced conference speaker, and author of the O’Reilly books Monolith To Microservices, Building Microservices, and the forthcoming Building Resilient Distributed Systems.
    View Sam’s profile
13:10

Lunch and Learn

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Lunch-and-learn with women and non-binary leaders

Grab lunch, meet your peers and discuss core engineering challenges.

+ More

Lunch and Learn

Lunch-and-learn with women and non-binary leaders

13:10 – 14:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Finding the right solution for core engineering issues isn’t about isolated thinking – it’s about building your support network and leveraging the power of peer learning via genuine diversity of experience.

Sign-up for our lunch-and-learn session where underrepresented leaders in engineering will be discussing core engineering challenges, share their experiences, and learn from one another, facilitated by experienced engineering leaders who will help guide the discussion.

Join conversations focused on:

  • How to build strong partnerships and upward influence to gain success for you and your teams.
  • Preventing burnout for yourself and your teams?
  • Evolving your leadership approach and identifying the skills your team needs to succeed in the age of AI
  • FEATURING
    Mareike Ziese
    Head of Software Engineering | Data Platforms & Outbound Commercemomox SE

    Mareike Ziese is Head of Software Engineering for Data Platforms & Outbound Commerce at momox, a leading European recommerce company. She leads teams building modern data and AI platforms that power pricing, marketing optimization, and large-scale commerce operations.

    A mother of two young girls and the owner of three horses — plus countless plants in her garden — she often connects lessons from nature and family life to her leadership approach. She believes great technology and strong teams grow under the same conditions: trust, clarity, and patience.

    View Mareike’s profile
  • Daniela Matheis
    Chief of Staff to the CTOioki

    In her role as Chief of Staff to the CTO, Daniela drives practical transformations in engineering culture, ensuring continuous learning is integrated into workflows. Using systemic coaching, she supports leaders in designing initiatives, improving team practices, and creating measurable impact across the organization.

    View Daniela’s profile
  • Silvia Schreier
    Principal EngineerIntersport

    As Principal Engineer and Architect at Intersport, Silvia Schreier is committed to bridging the gap between technology and business. With over a decade of experience in web development, architecture, and wholesale and retail product management, she combines deep technical expertise with a strong business perspective. Driven by her passion for collaboration and connecting people, Silvia helps teams find solutions that are not only technically sound and sustainable but also deliver real business value.

    View Silvia’s profile
14:25

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Translating up: Engineering advocacy for the C-suite

Learn to frame technical initiatives in business terms, win executive support, and drive strategic engineering investments forward.

+ More

Workshop

Translating up: Engineering advocacy for the C-suite

14:25 – 15:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

CircleCI Logo LeadDev

You know what needs to change. You see the technical opportunities clearly. But when you bring initiatives to executives, they hear “risky change” not “controlled experiment.” The result? Great ideas die in planning, technical debt compounds, and your team runs obsolete processes while competitors experiment their way forward.

The gap isn’t your technical competence—it’s translation. Executives operate in a different context with different constraints and accountabilities. They evaluate initiatives using frameworks like opportunity cost, customer impact, and risk management. Most staff+ engineers never learn to speak this language.

In this workshop, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber pulls back the curtain on how executives actually evaluate technical initiatives. You’ll learn how to better communicate and leverage technical frameworks to shift perception from “this sounds risky” to “this is a smart opportunity.” Discover how to frame experimentation as hypothesis testing, turn one-way doors into two-way doors, and position engineering investments using the same frameworks executives use for any strategic decision.

You’ll leave with practical tools to drive better alignment between your engineering and the board so you can advocate for and focus on outcomes that drive the business forward.

  • FEATURING
    Rob Zuber
    CTOCircleCI

    Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and a five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide.

    View Rob’s profile
16:25

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Beyond the benchmark: How to evaluate coding agents for real production success

Build trusted, production-ready evaluations for coding agents using criteria tailored to your architecture, workflows, standards, and risks.

+ More

Workshop

Beyond the benchmark: How to evaluate coding agents for real production success

16:25 – 17:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

AI coding agents can look amazing in a demo and still fail quietly in production. The benchmark scores look great, the PoC gets approved, and three months later… nothing ships, or worse: incidents spike and trust collapses.

Why? Because benchmarks don’t measure what your organization actually needs.

This workshop is for engineering leaders and senior ICs who are responsible for deciding whether, where, and how to adopt coding agents. Instead of relying on vendor benchmarks or generic evaluation frameworks, we’ll build a custom evaluation system tailored to your specific context: your architecture patterns, your coding standards, your team’s actual workflows. Through hands-on exercises, group critiques, and real examples, you’ll build your own evaluation rubric that you can defend to stakeholders and actually trust.

You’ll leave with a concrete, reusable toolkit to run coding agent evaluations on your terms, with metrics that matter to your organization.

This workshop focuses on designing custom evaluations for coding agents that reflect your production reality. We’ll move beyond vendor-supplied benchmark scores and into domain-specific assessment frameworks.

Benchmarks tell you how an agent performs on synthetic, simplified tasks. Your custom evals tell you whether it can produce code your team will merge, maintain, and trust. We’ll explore a pragmatic framework for translating your actual constraints—legacy architecture, compliance requirements, team skill distribution, incident response patterns—into concrete, testable evaluation criteria that give you a structured way to say “yes” or “no” with confidence.

  • FEATURING
    Fabian Friedl
    Co-FounderStraion

    Fabian Friedl is the Co-Founder of Straion.

    View Fabian’s profile
  • Katrin Freihofner
    Co-founderStraion

    Katrin Freihofner is a versatile professional with extensive experience in product management, user experience design, and software engineering. Throughout her career, she has excelled in key roles at companies like Elastic and Dynatrace. She successfully led distributed and cross-functional teams, established end-to-end user journeys, and played a crucial role in shaping product strategies. Currently a Co-Founder at Straion, Katrin has a proven track record of developing innovative solutions. She thrives in collaborative, fast-paced environments and maintains a strong commitment to leadership and continuous learning

    View profile
16:25

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Build your leadership manifesto

Define your leadership values, challenge your assumptions, and create a personal manifesto to guide confident, impactful decisions.

+ More

Workshop

Build your leadership manifesto

16:25 – 17:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Leadership in an uncertain world is tough, but having a strong personal north star can help you navigate stormy waters. A leadership manifesto can help you understand the real reasons you do what you do and give you a clear set of guidelines that makes decision-making with impact much easier.

The workshop will challenge your perceptions on what makes you a good leader and why you make the choices you make in leadership. It’s hands-on, crafty and interactive, a bit daft but with a real, tangible takeaway.
DirectorPlus Zone
10:55

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

Is your observability practice keeping pace with non-deterministic systems?

Explore how engineering leaders can rethink observability for AI systems, measuring customer outcomes, detecting hidden failures, and monitoring unpredictable behavior.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Is your observability practice keeping pace with non-deterministic systems?

10:55 – 11:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

Honeycomb Logo - LeadDev

The harder case is not an agent that fails. It is an agent that succeeds at something nobody needed, or returns a confident answer nobody checked, while every signal you have stays green.

Part of the problem is the unit. Availability, latency and error rates are measured per component. Your customer experiences a journey. You can have complete coverage of one and be blind to the other.

In this roundtable, senior engineering leaders discuss what it takes to answer the harder question.

Discussion Points

  • Measuring the journey, not the components. What would it take to build a signal that spans the path a customer actually travels?
  • Who found out first. The last production problem you heard about from finance, support or a customer rather than an alert.
  • What changed underneath you that you did not deploy. A model version, a provider’s latency. How did you find out?
  • Whether it was correct, whether it was useful, and what it cost are three different questions. Which can you answer today?
  • FEATURING
    Colin Burke
    Director of Customer Success – EMEAHoneycomb

    Colin Burke is the Director of Customer Success for EMEA at Honeycomb.io, where he helps engineering and technology leaders harness the full potential of observability to drive business outcomes. With more than a decade of experience at industry leaders like VMware and Pivotal, Colin has worked at the intersection of enterprise platforms, developer productivity, and system resilience.

    Throughout his career, Colin has partnered closely with product and engineering teams to scale modern platforms and improve velocity – always with a sharp focus on connecting technical excellence to strategic advantage. At Honeycomb, he empowers teams to shift observability from a reactive tool to a proactive driver of innovation and performance.

    View Colin’s profile
10:55

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

Rethinking how we hire and develop junior engineers

Explore how engineering leaders are rethinking junior hiring, skill development, and mentorship as AI transforms engineering roles and team dynamics.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Rethinking how we hire and develop junior engineers

10:55 – 11:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

CircleCI Logo LeadDev

As AI changes how software gets built, engineering leaders are rethinking what it means to hire and develop junior talent. While some organizations are pulling back on junior hiring, others, including CircleCI, are finding that early-career engineers bring valuable perspectives, curiosity, and an ability to adapt without having to unlearn established ways of working.

Join us for a private, director-level discussion on how engineering roles are evolving, what junior engineers need to succeed, and how leaders can rethink hiring, learning, and mentorship when even the most experienced engineers are figuring out new ways of working.

Discussion Points

  • Rethinking junior hiring: What makes junior engineers valuable in today’s engineering organizations, and how should leaders evaluate early-career talent as the role continues to evolve?
  • Developing skills beyond writing code: When AI handles more of the mechanics of coding, how do we help junior engineers intentionally build the technical understanding and problem-solving skills they still need?
  • Building teams that challenge assumptions: How can junior engineers’ fresh perspectives help experienced teams question established practices and adapt to new ways of building software?
  • Rethinking mentorship: When senior engineers don’t have all the answers either, how can teams move beyond traditional mentorship models and create opportunities to learn and experiment together?
  • FEATURING
    Rob Zuber
    CTOCircleCI

    Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and a five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide.

    View Rob’s profile
12:25

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

Handing over the keys: How much of engineering should AI own?

Where should engineering leaders draw the line on AI autonomy? Discuss delegation, guardrails, accountability, and trust as engineering roles evolve.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Handing over the keys: How much of engineering should AI own?

12:25 – 13:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

Incident.io LeadDev

AI is moving from suggesting code to writing, testing, and fixing it, and senior leaders are being asked how far to let that go.

This roundtable is a chance to compare where you’ve drawn the line, what guardrails made you comfortable, and what went wrong. We’ll focus on practical decisions, such as what to delegate, how to keep accountability clear, and how to build trust, while considering how this reshapes team structure and skills over the next few years.

Discussion includes:

  • Where has AI already taken over work on your team, and what made you comfortable letting it?
  • Where is your line today, and what evidence or experience would move it?
  • When AI gets something wrong, who owns the outcome, and how do you keep accountability clear?
12:25

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

How do you keep AI costs predictable when usage is skyrocketing?

Rising AI costs are forcing tough decisions. Compare approaches to spending controls, flexible budgeting, and proving ROI without slowing adoption.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

How do you keep AI costs predictable when usage is skyrocketing?

12:25 – 13:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

Some companies blew through their entire 2026 AI budget by May. Even if you didn’t, many engineering leaders are in a tough spot: tighten controls on the AI tools you just spent a year getting developers to adopt, or keep spending and hope the ROI story catches up. Meanwhile, traditional budgeting practices can’t match the pace of change with AI, leadership wants ROI numbers you can’t produce yet, and the cost levers you’ve tried might be doing more harm than good.

This roundtable is an honest conversation about what’s actually working and what isn’t.

Discussion includes:

  • What cost control levers are actually working? Rate limits, model tiering, team-level budgets, usage dashboards, approved tool lists: what have you tried, and what’s made a real dent vs. what just created friction?
  • How has your budgeting process changed? Traditional annual budgets don’t account for AI’s unpredictable cost curves. How have you adapted your planning, review cadence, and approval workflows for AI spend?
  • How are you being asked to report on AI ROI, and what are you actually able to show? Are you measuring cost avoidance, productivity lift, revenue impact, or just vibes?
  • FEATURING
    Laura Tacho
    Senior Principal TechnologistAWS
    Laura Tacho is a subject matter expert in measuring the efficiency of engineering organizations. Currently, she is a Senior Principal Technologist at AWS focusing on developer experience and AI-native development. Laura was previously the CTO of DX, where she led the company’s executive advisory and research programs. She is the co-author of the Core 4 Framework of Developer Productivity, used by companies like LEGO, Netflix, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Snowflake to measure and improve developer experience. In 2025, she was awarded Austrian Innovator of the Year. Laura’s been working on developer tools for 15 years, including building out some of the first developer tools for the Docker ecosystem.
    View Laura ‘s profile
14:55

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

AI in the SDLC: Where does trust end and risk begin?

Establishing trust in AI requires clear boundaries. Discuss how to balance autonomy, human oversight, and accountability across the software development lifecycle.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

AI in the SDLC: Where does trust end and risk begin?

14:55 – 15:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

Octopus Deploy LeadDev

A roundtable on how senior engineering leaders determine how much autonomy to extend to AI across the development lifecycle, and where human judgment must stay in the loop.

Discussion includes:

  • How to define the conditions under which AI autonomy can be extended – and what triggers a rollback of that trust
  • How to maintain accountability and traceability when AI is an active participant across the development lifecycle
  • How to build a consistent trust framework that scales across teams and tools as AI capability keeps shifting
14:55

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

Roundtable by Runpod

More details coming soon.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Roundtable by Runpod

14:55 – 15:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

Runpod LeadDev

More details coming soon.
16:25

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

How should engineering leaders prepare infrastructure for agentic AI at scale?

As agentic workloads grow, infrastructure faces new pressures. Discuss emerging bottlenecks, scalability, resilience, and managing unpredictable demand and costs.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

How should engineering leaders prepare infrastructure for agentic AI at scale?

16:25 – 17:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

Cockroach Labs New Logo

As AI agents move into production, infrastructure must support continuous, machine-driven activity across APIs, services and databases. What happens when demand grows faster and becomes less predictable than existing systems and operating models were designed for? This roundtable will explore how engineering leaders are preparing for agentic workloads, where they see new infrastructure risks emerging, and how they are balancing scalability, resilience, cost and operational complexity.

Discussion Points

  • How are agentic workloads changing the scale and predictability of demand across your infrastructure?
  • Where are the first bottlenecks likely to emerge as autonomous activity increases?
  • What would 10x the workload mean for your current architecture, costs and engineering teams?
  • How should infrastructure and operating models evolve to support continuous machine-driven demand without sacrificing resilience?
16:25

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

How should organisations verify quality in the AI SDLC?

When AI generates more code, how do teams maintain quality? Examine review bottlenecks, release processes, and evolving quality assurance practices.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

How should organisations verify quality in the AI SDLC?

16:25 – 17:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

QA.tech LeadDev

A roundtable on what quality means once writing code is the cheap part. The work moved downstream into review, releases, and maintenance, and developers now spend a large share of the week checking code they did not write. The conversation covers where that time goes and what leaders have changed in response, including the answers that did not work.

Discussions include:

  • How much of your developers’ week now goes to reviewing and fixing code they did not write, and what has that displaced?
  • What actually holds a change up between merge and production, and has that got worse or better this year?
  • If output continues to grow while the team shrinks, how must our approach to defining and safeguarding product quality evolve?
Community Zone
11:00

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Non-traditional leaders

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Non-traditional leaders

11:00 – 11:30

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.
11:40

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you redesign/rethink delivery when agents generate code at a volume no review process was designed for?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you redesign/rethink delivery when agents generate code at a volume no review process was designed for?

11:40 – 12:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

LaunchDarkly LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Jojo Mondal
    Engineering Team LeadBloomberg

    Abhik (Jojo) Mondal is an Engineering Team Lead at Bloomberg.

    View Jojo’s profile
  • Swati Bansal
    Engineering ManagerZendesk

    Swati bansal is an Engineering Manager with extensive experience building and scaling SaaS products and engineering teams. She currently leads teams at Zendesk, where she focuses on developing AI-powered agents and automation solutions that transform customer experience at scale.

    With a background spanning product engineering and leadership, Swati thrives on creating systems — both technical and human — that enable teams to deliver with clarity, speed, and impact. She’s passionate about the intersection of technology, collaboration, and continuous learning.

    View Swati’s profile
  • Kevin Holler
    Enterprise Solutions EngineerLaunchDarkly

    Kevin Holler is an Enterprise Solutions Engineer at LaunchDarkly, working with the companies biggest customers in the DACH region to de-risk their software and AI-driven product releases.

    View Kevin’s profile
11:40

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

How do you measure engineering performance without it feeling like surveillance?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you measure engineering performance without it feeling like surveillance?

11:40 – 12:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Swarmia

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Monica Jianu
    Fractional Engineering Leader

    Monica has spent most of her career in the messy middle of early-stage startups — building engineering teams, shaping product direction, and designing the lightweight processes that keep small companies moving fast. She’s worked across seed to Series B in healthtech and climatetech, moving between hands-on delivery, engineering management, and product leadership. She is particularly interested in figuring out why teams are stuck, turning debates into decisions, and treating process as experiment.

    View Monica’s profile
  • Roman Musatkin
    Head of Product & DesignSwarmia

    Roman is the Head of Product & Design at Swarmia, an engineering intelligence platform for modern software organizations. Working at the intersection of design, product, and engineering, Roman focuses on helping engineering organizations from startups to enterprises build better software faster. Before Swarmia, Roman led design at Smartly.io.

    View Roman ‘s profile
  • Elif Schaefer
    Engineering ManagerDKB Code Factory GmbH

    Elif Schaefer is a distinguished Engineering Manager with over a decade of managerial experience in the tech industry. With a passionate focus on people leadership, her strength lies in mentoring, coaching and cultivating high-performing (data) engineering teams. Shifting from hands-on technical work early in her career, Elif has flourished in roles that allow her to guide, inspire and influence those around her.

    View Elif ‘s profile
11:40

Industry Interest Groups

Connecting engineering leaders in Banking and Financial Services

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

+ More

Industry Interest Groups

Connecting engineering leaders in Banking and Financial Services

11:40 – 12:10

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

  • FEATURING
    Robert Lübke
    Director of EngineeringPleo

    Dr. Robert Lübke is an engineering leader with more than 15 years of experience building software, teams, and platforms in fast-growing technology companies. Most recently, as Director of Engineering at Pleo, he led teams focused on developer experience, engineering productivity, and the shared foundations that help product teams move quickly and safely. His work spans technical strategy, organisational design, leadership development, and large-scale change. Robert is particularly interested in creating environments where engineers can do their best work and where teams deliver meaningful outcomes.

    View Robert’s profile
  • Florian Mierzejewski
    Senior Staff EngineerQonto

    Florian Mierzejewski is a Senior Staff Engineer at Qonto with over 10 years of software engineering experience and a strong mobile background. He has worked across agencies and startups for clients around the world, contributing to a wide range of projects, from greenfield builds to large, untested legacy codebases.

    Florian focuses on writing simple, readable code, applying best practices, and making a positive impact. He is passionate about sharing knowledge, pair programming, and mentoring with empathy and pragmatism.

    View Florian’s profile
  • Dmytro Basan
    Engineering ManagerKlarna

    Driving the future of engineering leadership, Dmytro combines extensive experience in uniting business and technology to drive impactful results. At Klarna, he managed multiple teams across cross-functional areas, delivering scalable business solutions, optimizing high-load applications, and integrating cutting-edge AI innovations. He is a strong advocate for empathy and growth in tech careers, with a passion for building high-performing teams and fostering innovation.

    Beyond Klarna, Dmytro contributes to industry dialogue through speaking engagements and podcasts, shaping trends in engineering and leadership excellence.

    View Dmytro’s profile
12:40

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you keep your systems resilient against traffic spikes or attacks you can’t predict?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you keep your systems resilient against traffic spikes or attacks you can't predict?

12:40 – 13:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Cloudflare LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    King Immanuel Edoh
    Senior Product & Engineering LeadDigital Planet X & Code Campus

    King Immanuel Edoh is a senior product and engineering lead with experience building and scaling software products across startups, agencies, and developer education platforms. He works with Code Campus and also leads Digital Planet X, where he partners with companies to deliver pragmatic, production-ready solutions under real-world constraints. His work focuses on making sound technical and product decisions in environments where reliability, cost, and team capacity matter more than hype. Drawing from hands-on experience across emerging markets and global teams, King-Immanuel brings a grounded perspective on leadership, trade-offs, and sustainable engineering practices.

    View King’s profile
  • Laura Ureche
    Principal EngineerSeven.One Entertainment Group

    Laura Ureche is a Principal Engineer with over 13 years of experience across startups and large organizations. She has a background in testing, software development, and SRE, and is known for driving scalable solutions, improving system reliability, and mentoring engineering teams. Passionate about problem-solving and observability, she helps teams deliver high-quality, impactful software.

    View Laura’s profile
12:40

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you build a testing culture where everyone feels responsible for quality?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you build a testing culture where everyone feels responsible for quality?

12:40 – 13:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Testkube LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.
12:40

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Queer leaders

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Queer leaders

12:40 – 13:10

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

  • FEATURING
    David Gómez Bermejo
    Engineering People ManagerFlix

    David Gómez Bermejo is an Engineering People Manager at Flix.

    View David’s profile
  • Milica Ostojic
    Team Lead Software Engineeringottonova

    Milica Ostojic is a Team Lead Software Engineering at ottonova.

    View Milica’s profile
  • Rolando Angelini
    Director of Software EngineeringAffirm

    Rolando is currently working in the world of agile product development in FinTech, with a focus on Developer Productivity. He has extensive experience in Tech Leadership, Software Engineering, Project Management, Strategic Planning, and IT Coaching across various industries: Finance/Banking/FinTech, People & Talent, TELCO, EdTech, Retail, and eCommerce (OTA/Travel industry). He considers himself a seasoned Tech Leader and Software Engineer. He is also an enthusiast of TDD, Kubernetes (k8s), Kotlin, Golang, and DevSecOps. Building teams and crafting software are not just duties of my profession, they are two of his greatest passions. Rolando also loves learning new things, mentoring, coaching, researching, and traveling.

    View Rolando ‘s profile
  • Steven Langbroek
    Engineering Manager Web CoreAVIV Group

    Steven has over 15 years of experience building teams across interfaces, APIs, and developer tools, balancing curiosity with pragmatism. Passionate about equity and inclusion, he creates psychologically safe environments where people thrive. Steven specializes in helping organizations shift from project-based delivery to product thinking, bringing DevOps and systems thinking to bureaucratic, siloed environments. He participates regularly in community events, like QueerJS and LeadDev.

    View Steven ‘s profile
13:40

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Black leaders

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Black leaders

13:40 – 14:10

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

  • FEATURING
    Samuel Ngwarai
    Staff EngineerFree2move

    Samuel Ngwarai is a Staff Engineer at Free2move.

    View Samuel’s profile
  • Samuel Okoth
    Engineering ManagerBabbel

    Samuel is an Engineering Manager based in Berlin, deeply passionate about the intersection of people and technology. His career journey began as a software engineer in Kenya, where he honed his technical skills before transitioning into leadership. Samuel now excels at guiding high-performing teams, empowering engineers to achieve their full potential. He is a strong advocate for leveraging cutting-edge advancements in AI and Cloud technologies to drive innovation and create meaningful impact in the tech landscape.

    View Samuel’s profile
  • James Samuel
    Engineering ManagerReddit

    James Samuel is an Engineering Manager at Reddit specializing in scaling software teams and software architectures. Prior to joining the mobility sector, he had worked in Fintech, EdTech, and PropTech. He’s also a co-organiser of the @AWS UserGroup Berlin Meetup. James is passionate about empowering engineers through his blog, presentations, and monthly newsletter.

    View James’s profile
14:40

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you keep up with the endless stream of CVEs without burning out?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you keep up with the endless stream of CVEs without burning out?

14:40 – 15:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Chainguard LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Julian Klodzinski
    Sales EngineerChainguard

    Julian Klodzinski is a Sales Engineer at Chainguard.

    View Julian’s profile
  • Kateryna Tsypkina
    Software EngineerZalando

    Kateryna Tsypkina is a Software Engineer at Zalando.

    View Kateryna’s profile
  • Christian Dewein
    Chief Technology Officerioki

    Christian Dewein is a software engineer and CTO based in Frankfurt am Main. He leads the development of innovative mobility solutions for public transport at ioki GmbH, a Deutsche Bahn subsidiary. Passionate about technology, community building, and elegant software design, he actively contributes to open-source projects and local developer meetups. Christian values simplicity, craftsmanship, and the intersection of code and real-world impact. Besides that, he organizes Europe’s biggest conference for mechanical computer keyboards, a free community-event for fans of the hobby.

    View Christian’s profile
14:40

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you build a learning culture that keeps pace with rapidly evolving technology and AI trends?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you build a learning culture that keeps pace with rapidly evolving technology and AI trends?

14:40 – 15:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

O'Reilly x LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Tetiana Shylina
    Quality and Process LeadIDEMIA Public Security

    Tetiana Shylina is a Quality & Process Lead with 10+ years of experience across software quality, engineering processes, and delivery in telecom, banking, and digital identity.

    She focuses on building scalable quality and risk management practices, improving delivery and release processes, and helping cross-functional teams make quality a shared responsibility rather than a final testing step.

    Beyond her engineering role, Tetiana is the founder of a QA education project, where she works with a team of mentors to help people build careers in tech.

    View Tetiana’s profile
  • João Martinelli
    Engineering ManagerWellhub

    João is a Software Engineering Manager at Wellhub, leading 2 teams that build data and AI products across iOS, Android, and backend. An engineer at heart, he’s passionate about taking teams from forming to performing. His career has spanned 12 cities across 5 countries, managing multicultural teams in onsite, hybrid, and remote setups. He has worked across industries from aerospace embedded software to banking cybersecurity, building scalable systems aligned with business goals. A servant leader, João focuses on people: coaching engineers and peers so they can do their best work. He believes real growth happens outside our comfort zones.

    View João’s profile
  • Niall Johnson
    Strategic Account ManagerO'Reilly Media Inc.

    Niall Johnson sits within the international team at O’Reilly and is responsible for leading partnerships with key enterprise accounts across EMEA. In this role, he provides support and strategic vision to to ensure his customers maximise value throughout their learning journeys across O’Reilly. Niall has a passion for lifelong learning. He has spent the last 6 years in the technology sector and brings extensive knowledge of working with large organisations to implement transformational projects to deliver successful business outcomes.

    View Niall ‘s profile
14:40

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Parent leaders

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Parent leaders

14:40 – 15:10

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

  • FEATURING
    Dmitry Kuznetsov
    Engineering ManagerDoctolib

    Dmitry Kuznetsov is an Engineering Manager at Doctolib, working on an AI-powered Phone Assistant for healthcare across Europe and beyond. With more than 18 years of experience across software engineering, infrastructure, networking, distributed systems and voice technologies, he focuses on building strong engineering teams, scalable systems and sustainable ways of working.

    As both a parent and an engineering leader, Dmitry is particularly interested in how people can grow in demanding careers while staying present in family life. Outside of work, he practices Taekwondo and spends plenty of time supporting his daughter in competitive ballroom dancing.

    View Dmitry’s profile
  • Julian Fink
    Senior Engineering Manager

    Julian is a versatile and passionate engineering leader with over 15 years of experience in developing complex software systems in highly regulated environments, specializing in AI/ML and digital health.

    View Julian’s profile
  • Ferit Topcu
    Senior Manager, Engineering ManagementZenjob SE

    Ferit Topcu is a Berlin-based Engineering Manager at Zenjob SE, where he leads the Mobile & Marketing Platform Team. With over a decade of software engineering expertise, he’s passionate about exploring AI’s intersection with current engineering roles, its impact on the future of work and React Native. Known for his humor, often derived from his adventures raising three kids, Ferit brings authenticity and humanity to technical leadership. As an active community contributor, he is co-host of the LeadDev Meetup in Berlin.

    View Ferit’s profile
15:30

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How can organisations maintain control as AI democratises the building of internal software?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How can organisations maintain control as AI democratises the building of internal software?

15:30 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Retool LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Nathan Hamill
    Senior Solutions EngineerRetool

    Nathan Hamill is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Retool.

    View Nathan’s profile
  • Irina Khusainova
    Engineering ManagerNelly Solutions

    Irina Khusainova is an Engineering Manager at Nelly Solutions.

    View Irina’s profile
  • Maylin Leal Vilarino
    Head of EngineeringBonial

    Maylin Leal Vilarino is a Head of Engineering with over a decade of experience building scalable engineering organizations. Starting as a working student, she built her career by intentionally alternating between hands-on technical and leadership roles, believing the best leaders never stop learning. She specializes in growing engineering leaders, navigating organizational change, and aligning technology strategy with business impact.

    View Maylin’s profile
15:30

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you teach judgment, not just syntax, to engineers who’ve grown up with AI assistants?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you teach judgment, not just syntax, to engineers who've grown up with AI assistants?

15:30 – 16:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

In partnership with:

CodeYourFuture LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Tuhin Subhra Mitra
    Engineering ManagerDoctolib

    Tuhin is an Engineering Manager at Doctolib, where he leads a distributed engineering organization spanning France, Germany, and Italy, managing both individual contributors and engineering managers. Based in Amsterdam, he works daily in Kotlin and Java while spending increasing time at the intersection of engineering leadership and applied AI — building multi-agent systems for code review, running rigorous evals on coding-agent context strategies, and designing tools that let context persist durably across sessions instead of being lost. His talks draw on production experience rather than theory: real tickets, real run counts, and the honest lessons learned putting agentic systems in front of working engineering teams.

    View Tuhin’s profile
  • Darja Povirk
    Engineering ManagerEnmacc

    Darja Povirk is an Engineering Manager at Enmacc.

    View Darja’s profile
  • Daniel Wagner-Hall
    Director of Technical EducationCodeYourFuture

    Daniel Wagner-Hall is the Director of Technical Education at CodeYourFuture.

    View Daniel’s profile
15:30

Industry Interest Groups

Connecting engineering leaders in Ecommerce

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

+ More

Industry Interest Groups

Connecting engineering leaders in Ecommerce

15:30 – 16:00

Join our relaxed sessions where you can meet peers working in similar domains to share ideas, collaborate on challenges and exchange solutions.

  • FEATURING
    Tushar Gupta
    Engineering LeadSchwarz Digits IT

    Tushar is a senior IT professional with extensive experience in the e-commerce domain, specialising in solution architecture and team leadership. He focus on building scalable, high-performance systems, migrating from legacy platforms, and driving innovation in competitive markets.

    View Tushar’s profile
  • Juraj Kojdjak
    Director of EngineeringConrad Electronic

    Juraj is an engineering leader at Conrad Electronic driving tech behind B2B e-commerce solutions.

    View Juraj’s profile
  • Rafał Szul
    Senior Manager, EngineeringAllegro.pl

    Rafał is an experienced leader of leaders at Allegro, Poland’s largest e-commerce platform. He earned his first money from programming at just 7 years old. With an MSc in Computer Science, he progressed through tester, developer, and first-line manager roles. Today, he focuses on building a large tech organization while scaling one of the most unique fulfillment solutions in Poland. Outside of work, Rafał holds a pilot’s license and is an avid martial arts fan.

    View Rafał’s profile
  • Matej Strašek
    Senior Engineering ManagerExoticca

    Matej Strašek drives AI transformation within his teams at Exoticca, where he currently leads engineers building intelligent customer experiences and empowers operations with AI—from voicebots and chatbots to automated travel processes. He helps people evolve into problem solvers, creating outcome-driven groups that use AI to multiply their impact. His teams align around company moonshots, combining a technical mindset with the real world to deliver real impact. His way of resetting? Singing and flying over the landscapes of Slovenia.

    View Matej ‘s profile
16:45

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you know if your internal platform is actually helping teams ship faster, or just adding another layer?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you know if your internal platform is actually helping teams ship faster, or just adding another layer?

16:45 – 17:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Akuity LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Shivam Agrawal
    Technical Solutions EngineerAkuity

    Shivam Agrawal is a Technical Solutions Engineer at Akuity.

    View Shivam’s profile
  • Piyush Mor
    Principal EngineerZalando

    Piyush Mor is a Principal Engineer at Zalando.

    View Piyush’s profile
  • Mareike Ziese
    Head of Software Engineering | Data Platforms & Outbound Commercemomox SE

    Mareike Ziese is Head of Software Engineering for Data Platforms & Outbound Commerce at momox, a leading European recommerce company. She leads teams building modern data and AI platforms that power pricing, marketing optimization, and large-scale commerce operations.

    A mother of two young girls and the owner of three horses — plus countless plants in her garden — she often connects lessons from nature and family life to her leadership approach. She believes great technology and strong teams grow under the same conditions: trust, clarity, and patience.

    View Mareike’s profile
16:45

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you protect focus time for your team when communication never stops?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you protect focus time for your team when communication never stops?

16:45 – 17:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Superhuman LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.
16:45

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Trans* and Gender Non-conforming leaders

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Trans* and Gender Non-conforming leaders

16:45 – 17:15

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

  • FEATURING
    Katrin Deanna Kirchert
    Senior Lead Consultant Data Privacy]init[ AG für digitale Kommunikation

    Katrin Deanna Kirchert is a Senior Lead Consultant Data Privacy at ]init[ AG für digitale Kommunikation.

    View Katrin’s profile
  • Sasha Göbbels
    Senior Engineering ManagerOverleaf

    With a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry Sasha never worked as a chemist but went straight into software development. After writing software for telco providers, airports and federal German police she fell for web development.
    First as an individual contributor, then as a tech/team lead and senior engineering manager because she discovered that working with people is even more awesome than working with tech alone. On her way she also co-founded two companies and currently is working as a (senior) engineering manager at Overleaf/Digital Science. But still she couldn’t let go of writing software. Sasha is trans femme.

    View Sasha’s profile
Solution Zone
11:00

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Learn how to run pipelines autonomously with CircleCI

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

Learn how to run pipelines autonomously with CircleCI

11:00 – 11:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

CircleCI Logo LeadDev

Watch a complete software delivery pipeline go from zero to running in minutes, then spend the rest of the session on the more interesting question: what do you do with all the time you just got back?

CircleCI’s Jenny Miggin will demo the new CircleCI CLI live, and and lead a discussion on how tools with robust terminal-based access reduce the burden of setup so you can get to building software. Whether you’re a technical founder, a domain expert eyeing your first product, or an executive wondering why your team still struggles with deployments, this session shows how much simpler getting code into production can be today, and opens the floor to what that possibility actually unlocks.
11:00

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Aiven

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

Live demo: Aiven

11:00 – 11:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Aiven LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.
11:00

Meet the Author

Meet the author: Sam Newman

Bring a book and get it signed, or just have a chat with the author.

  • Sam Newman Sam Newman & Associates
    Independent Tech Consultant & Author
+ More

Meet the Author

Meet the author: Sam Newman

11:00 – 11:30

Sponsored by:

O'Reilly x LeadDev

Bring a book and get it signed, or just have a chat with the author at the O’Reilly booth.

  • FEATURING
    Sam Newman
    Independent Tech Consultant & AuthorSam Newman & Associates
    Sam Newman is an independent consultant who loves solving problems with technology. Focusing primarily in the areas of cloud, microservice architecture and continuous delivery, Sam works with companies big and small all over the world. He is also an experienced conference speaker, and author of the O’Reilly books Monolith To Microservices, Building Microservices, and the forthcoming Building Resilient Distributed Systems.
    View Sam’s profile
11:15

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

The easy way to fix all your CVEs (don’t try at work)

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

The easy way to fix all your CVEs (don't try at work)

11:15 – 11:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Chainguard LeadDev

Two ways to cut your CVE count: one that fools your dashboard, and one that actually works.

AI helps teams ship faster, and CVEs pile up just as fast. Scanners flag hundreds of findings, most of them in base images and transitive dependencies nobody chose. Stretched teams end up spending feature time on triage.

Julian shows two ways to bring your CVE count down. The first looks fantastic on the dashboard and doesn’t make you one bit more secure. The second starts upstream, with minimal images, current versions and a supply chain that stops vulnerabilities before they reach production.

Key takeaways

  • A low CVE count on a dashboard doesn’t mean you’re secure
  • Most CVE noise comes from things your team never chose, like bloated base images and outdated transitive dependencies
  • Fixing the problem upstream frees developer time permanently, instead of buying a quiet week
11:15

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Governed GitOps: Shipping faster without bypassing change control

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Governed GitOps: Shipping faster without bypassing change control

11:15 – 11:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Akuity LeadDev

Enterprises have spent years automating how software gets deployed. How software gets approved is still largely manual: tickets raised by hand, approvals chased in chat, and audit evidence pieced together after the fact.

To close that gap, many organisations build their own. CI pipelines get extended with custom scripts that call change management APIs, wait for approvals, and decide what gets promoted where. It works at first. Over time, this glue code becomes a critical system that nobody owns: brittle, hard to audit, different for every team, and tied to whoever originally wrote it. The result is predictable. Either releases slow down to match the change process, or teams quietly work around it.

This session shows a different model. Promotion between environments becomes a governed, Git-native workflow, and each stage carries the level of control it actually needs. Automated checks, policy gates and human approvals are applied where the risk calls for them, with change requests created and closed automatically as part of the promotion. Every change is rendered into the exact manifests that will be deployed and opened as a pull request, so reviewers approve what will actually run, not templates or values files. All of it is declared as configuration, not maintained as custom code.
11:40

Next Steps AMA

Tackling the role of Tech Lead

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for tackling the role of a Tech Lead.

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Tackling the role of Tech Lead

11:40 – 12:10

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for tackling the role of a Tech Lead.

  • FEATURING
    Sattar Falahati
    Division ManagerSpindox

    Sattar builds engineering organizations, recovers delivery when things get stuck, and grows the leaders who take over from him. With 13+ years in tech, he started hands-on and now leads leaders across 210+ engineers. He stays technical enough to challenge architecture and risk, but focuses on a bigger question: do his people have what they need to execute? His experience spans mobile, backend, and frontend, as well as coaching managers, rebuilding trust, and improving how teams hire and grow. He believes the best leaders build teams that can succeed even when they’re not in the room.

    View Sattar’s profile
  • Michael Hill
    Managing EditorLeadDev

    Michael is a senior editor, journalist, and content strategist with over 10 years’ experience delivering high-impact content across digital, webinars, podcasts, video, print, and live events. He is a proven leader of editorial strategy for global B2B publications, with a strong track record in audience growth, community and thought leadership, commercial projects, and cross-functional collaboration. Michael is passionate about shaping compelling editorial narratives that inform, engage, and drive measurable impact.

    View Michael’s profile
  • Leandro Vilas
    Software Engineering Team LeadAppinio

    Lean Vilas is a Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead, and mentor with over a decade of experience helping developers grow into confident, high-impact contributors.

    Known for blending technical expertise with a deep focus on people, he teaches software engineers how to navigate career transitions, especially the leap from individual contributor to engineering manager.
    Through his newsletter “From IC to EM” and conference talks, he shares practical, human-centered leadership insights that resonate with devs who want to lead without losing themselves.

    View Leandro’s profile
  • Mahdi Pourziaei
    Tech LeadFashion Cloud

    Mahdi Pourziaei is a Tech Lead / Staff Engineer at Fashion Cloud, driving platform engineering and leading post-startup architecture.

    View Mahdi ‘s profile
  • Theresa Robinson
    Technical LeadRolls-Royce Deutschland

    Theresa Robinson has a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her academic research was in numerical optimization applied to computational fluid dynamic problems, and robust and surrogate-based optimization algorithms. She was an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Queen’s University Belfast from 2008 to 2012.

    In 2012 she joined Rolls-Royce Deutschland, where she has worked on robust optimization of aircraft engine exhaust systems, safety and reliability analysis and simulation, and python development of internal tools. Currently she is the technical lead for Engine Network, a tool to help Rolls-Royce analyse, visualize, forecast the behaviour of in-service aircraft engines.

    View Theresa’s profile
12:10

Peer Hangouts

Staff Engineer Hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

Staff Engineer Hangout

12:10 – 12:40

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Paulina Overaitė
    Staff EngineerVinted

    Paulina Overaitė is a Staff Engineer at Vinted.

    View Paulina’s profile
  • Simone van Buuren
    Staff+ Lead EngineerNeko Health

    Simone van Buuren is a Staff+ Lead Engineer at Neko Health.

    View Simone’s profile
  • Natalia Gorchakova
    Staff Software EngineerGoogle

    Natalia is a Staff Engineer at Google Cloud, driven by her passion for data. She specializes in collecting data and turning it into useful insights for both customers and internal product development. In her role on the Dataplex team, she sets the technical direction for Data Lineage.


    Natalia brings over 18 years of software engineering experience, including more than a decade in technical leadership, guiding teams and managing the full software lifecycle from architecture to production.

    View Natalia’s profile
  • Bartosz Ocytko
    Executive Principal EngineerZalando

    Bartosz is an Executive Principal Engineer at Zalando’s eCommerce Platform, where he is responsible for group-wide B2C business and Developer Platforms that serve over 50m customers. Bartosz leads and contributes to strategic and group-wide engineering initiatives for platform capabilities, customer-facing products, and more recently focused on engineering productivity, GenAI, and Machine Learning. In the past 8+ years, he has role modeled the senior individual contributor track at Zalando, mentored engineers throughout their senior IC growth journeys, and helped set up Zalando’s Principal Engineering Community.

    View Bartosz’s profile
  • Daniel Schniepp
    Chief Architect for Developer and Cloud Infrastructure PlatformsMercedes-Benz Group AG

    Daniel is as a Chief Architect for Developer and Cloud Infrastructure Platforms at Mercedes-Benz Group AG.

    View Daniel’s profile
12:40

Next Steps AMA

Making the leap to Engineering Manager

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for making the leap to Engineering Manager.

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Making the leap to Engineering Manager

12:40 – 13:10

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for making the leap to Engineering Manager.

  • FEATURING
    Holger Frohloff
    Engineering ManagerSamedi

    Holger Frohloff is an Engineering Manager at Samedi.

    View Holger’s profile
  • Nataliya Pasichnyk
    Engineering ManagerNetflix

    Nataliya is an Engineering Manager at Netflix, leading a team focused on building and improving an internal product. She’s an active mentor and supports non-profit initiatives that help women advance in tech, including serving as a leader of the Women@Netflix ERG in Warsaw.

    View Nataliya’s profile
  • Marta Kędzior-Krasoczko
    Test Engineering ManagerHSBC

    Marta Kędzior-Krasoczko is an Engineering Manager with over 20 years of experience.

    View Marta’s profile
  • Rui Posse
    Engineering ManagerHosting.com

    Engineering Manager and Full-Stack engineer with 10+ years’ experience leading remote teams, Rui specialises in JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue.js and Node.js. Passionate about mentoring and team culture, he focuses on clear direction, modern engineering practices and pragmatic delivery that balances business impact with technical quality. He is passionate about tech communities and actively engages in sharing knowledge and supporting other engineers.

    View Rui’s profile
13:40

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Honeycomb

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

Live demo: Honeycomb

13:40 – 13:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Honeycomb Logo - LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.
13:40

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to automate incident investigation with an AI SRE agent and Bronto

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to automate incident investigation with an AI SRE agent and Bronto

13:40 – 13:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Bronto LeadDev

Debugging a production incident means jumping between tools while it’s live, then building the same picture again when it recurs. See an AI SRE agent work a live incident in a microservices app through Bronto’s MCP server, querying metrics, logs, and traces to find the cause, then saving it as a monitor and playbook.
13:55

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Building AI products when nobody knows the answer: Real stories from Superhuman

Learn how Superhuman teams test ideas, navigate uncertainty, and make confident AI product decisions without a clear playbook.

+ More

Solution Talk

Building AI products when nobody knows the answer: Real stories from Superhuman

13:55 – 14:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Superhuman LeadDev

Most product stories are told backwards. Once a feature succeeds, it’s easy to believe the path was obvious all along.

In reality, product teams work with competing hypotheses, incomplete evidence, and no clear playbook. The challenge isn’t finding the “right” answer—it’s making good decisions before anyone knows what the right answer is.

In this talk, we’ll share real stories from our experiences building AI features at Superhuman: how we designed experiments, navigated disagreements, interpreted ambiguous data, and made decisions despite uncertainty.

This isn’t a framework or a polished success story. It’s an honest look at what product development actually feels like while it’s happening, and what we’ve learned about making progress before the story makes sense in hindsight.

Key takeaways

  • How to design small, honest experiments when there’s no ground truth to validate against
  • Why “we don’t know yet” is a legitimate, even healthy, place to make a decision from
  • Practical ways to keep momentum on an AI feature when the roadmap can’t be fully planned in advance
13:55

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Agent governance: How to actually run agents across your business

Learn how to give agents real autonomy while keeping access, risk, costs, and accountability firmly under control.

+ More

Solution Talk

Agent governance: How to actually run agents across your business

13:55 – 14:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Retool LeadDev

How do you hand agents real freedom across your business without carrying the risk when one gets it wrong, or the bill when it goes too far? We’ll explore how you can hold onto that freedom while still governing agents securely; from making sure users can only view or edit what they’re actually allowed to, to tackling whether that AI spend is delivering real value across your organisation.

Key Takeways

  • Grant agents real autonomy without losing control: guardrails that catch mistakes before they cause damage
  • Lock down access so agents only see or touch what they’re permitted to, inherited from your existing permissions
  • Build in audit trails so risk stays traceable without slowing teams down
  • Prove AI spend is delivering real value, not just “we deployed agents”
  • Avoid the two big failure modes: agents overstepping bounds, and AI costs outrunning the value they create
14:00

Peer Hangouts

Engineering Manager Hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

Engineering Manager Hangout

14:00 – 14:30

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Holger Frohloff
    Engineering ManagerSamedi

    Holger Frohloff is an Engineering Manager at Samedi.

    View Holger’s profile
  • Nataliya Pasichnyk
    Engineering ManagerNetflix

    Nataliya is an Engineering Manager at Netflix, leading a team focused on building and improving an internal product. She’s an active mentor and supports non-profit initiatives that help women advance in tech, including serving as a leader of the Women@Netflix ERG in Warsaw.

    View Nataliya’s profile
  • Marta Kędzior-Krasoczko
    Test Engineering ManagerHSBC

    Marta Kędzior-Krasoczko is an Engineering Manager with over 20 years of experience.

    View Marta’s profile
  • Rui Posse
    Engineering ManagerHosting.com

    Engineering Manager and Full-Stack engineer with 10+ years’ experience leading remote teams, Rui specialises in JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue.js and Node.js. Passionate about mentoring and team culture, he focuses on clear direction, modern engineering practices and pragmatic delivery that balances business impact with technical quality. He is passionate about tech communities and actively engages in sharing knowledge and supporting other engineers.

    View Rui’s profile
14:10

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to run and govern a software factory, from specification to production, with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to run and govern a software factory, from specification to production, with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

14:10 – 14:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Confidence in an autonomous software factory comes from what you can measure and govern. This demo sets out the building blocks of a software factory, the bar a person sets for each kind of change, the evidence every step leaves, and the numbers that show autonomy holding – including the decisions a person keeps.
14:10

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

From PR to production: CodeRabbit, the trust layer for software engineering

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

From PR to production: CodeRabbit, the trust layer for software engineering

14:10 – 14:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

CodeRabbit

AI can write the change. Your team still owns what reaches production. Follow one realistic software change through CodeRabbit’s PR review, security analysis, Triage, and Slack to see how teams turn code into evidence, focus human attention, and make informed shipping decisions.
14:25

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Shaping your path to Principal Engineering

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Shaping your path to Principal Engineering

14:25 – 14:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Zalando LeadDev

Reaching the Senior Engineer level often brings a familiar dilemma: where do you go when people management is not your goal? For Yanire Romero, the Principal Engineer track at Zalando was the obvious destination, but navigating the jump from team execution to high-leverage technical leadership was uncharted territory.

In this talk, Yanire breaks down how she charted her promotion to Principal Engineer. Grounded in her experience across Zalando’s tech ecosystem, she shares an actionable framework built around Expanding Scope, Shifting Mindset, and Fostering Community. Attendees will walk away with concrete reflection prompts and practical strategies to drive cross-organizational impact on the IC track.
14:25

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solution Talk with Teleport

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solution Talk with Teleport

14:25 – 14:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Teleport LeadDev

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems. 
14:40

Next Steps AMA

Stepping into the role of Staff Engineer

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for stepping into the role of a Staff Engineer.

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Stepping into the role of Staff Engineer

14:40 – 15:10

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for stepping into the role of a Staff Engineer.

  • FEATURING
    Paulina Overaitė
    Staff EngineerVinted

    Paulina Overaitė is a Staff Engineer at Vinted.

    View Paulina’s profile
  • Simone van Buuren
    Staff+ Lead EngineerNeko Health

    Simone van Buuren is a Staff+ Lead Engineer at Neko Health.

    View Simone’s profile
  • Natalia Gorchakova
    Staff Software EngineerGoogle

    Natalia is a Staff Engineer at Google Cloud, driven by her passion for data. She specializes in collecting data and turning it into useful insights for both customers and internal product development. In her role on the Dataplex team, she sets the technical direction for Data Lineage.


    Natalia brings over 18 years of software engineering experience, including more than a decade in technical leadership, guiding teams and managing the full software lifecycle from architecture to production.

    View Natalia’s profile
  • Daniel Schniepp
    Chief Architect for Developer and Cloud Infrastructure PlatformsMercedes-Benz Group AG

    Daniel is as a Chief Architect for Developer and Cloud Infrastructure Platforms at Mercedes-Benz Group AG.

    View Daniel’s profile
15:20

Next Steps AMA

Diving into the role of Engineering Director

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of an Engineering Director.

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Diving into the role of Engineering Director

15:20 – 15:50

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of an Engineering Director.

  • FEATURING
    Mariana Pasichnyk
    Senior Engineering Director IDEMIA

    Mariana is a Senior Engineering Director of the Digital ID Platform at IDEMIA, where she leads cross-functional teams across development, QA, DevOps, and delivery. She drives engineering excellence while ensuring the delivery of scalable, secure digital identity solutions. Deeply committed to talent development and team engagement, she focuses on building high-performing teams and nurturing leadership growth. Mariana brings a collaborative, people centric approach to engineering. She combines strategic vision with strong execution to deliver impactful solutions. Outside of work, she enjoys running, swimming, hiking in the mountains, learning tennis, and mentoring others.

    View Mariana’s profile
  • Josh Winfield-Harris
    Engineering & Delivery DirectorNeuron

    Josh Winfield-Harris is an Engineering & Delivery Director at Neuron.

    View Josh ‘s profile
  • Anita Singh
    Director of EngineeringLyft

    Anita is an engineering leader passionate about building delightful user experiences and helping teams create quality software that users love. She began her career at larger public tech companies before moving into the startup world, working across Silicon Valley and Berlin, where she’s helped scale teams, culture, processes, and software from the ground up. In her current role, she enjoys coaching engineering managers and staff engineers.

    View Anita’s profile
15:30

Peer Hangouts

CTO Hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

CTO Hangout

15:30 – 16:00

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!
16:05

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to measure the real ROI of AI coding tools with Swarmia

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to measure the real ROI of AI coding tools with Swarmia

16:05 – 16:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Swarmia

Every engineering org has rolled out AI coding tools. Few can answer: is the spend paying off?

Roman shows how to measure real return, tying AI usage to speed, quality, and cost. You’ll see why build costs fall while maintenance doesn’t, and how to decide what to scale and cut.

  • FEATURING
    Roman Musatkin
    Head of Product & DesignSwarmia

    Roman is the Head of Product & Design at Swarmia, an engineering intelligence platform for modern software organizations. Working at the intersection of design, product, and engineering, Roman focuses on helping engineering organizations from startups to enterprises build better software faster. Before Swarmia, Roman led design at Smartly.io.

    View Roman ‘s profile
16:05

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Factory

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

Live demo: Factory

16:05 – 16:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Factory.ai LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.
16:20

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Solution Talk with Fin

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Solution Talk with Fin

16:20 – 16:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Fin LeadDev

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

Join these 10-minute talks to explore how our partners are helping teams tackle real-world engineering challenges. Each session shares practical examples, lessons learned, and insights into the decisions behind the solutions — giving you ideas you can take back to your own teams and systems. 
16:20

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

The call ended. The conversation didn’t: Voice and text agents in One Thread

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

The call ended. The conversation didn't: Voice and text agents in One Thread

16:20 – 16:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Twilio

Learn how to eliminate cross-channel glue code and unify voice and messaging into a single conversational thread using Twilio Agent Connect.

Your customer calls your voice agent on Monday and texts your support agent on Wednesday. For them, that’s one conversation. For most stacks, it’s two systems with two transcripts, held together by glue code and webhooks someone has to maintain.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In this live demo, you’ll see how Twilio Agent Connect puts voice and text agents into a single conversation thread.

Every call and every message lands in the exact same history, and because every interaction naturally converges in one place, it becomes the ideal inflection point to understand customer needs in real time and extract those insights into a single, persistent profile.

This architecture avoids locking you into proprietary, platform-baked AI. You bring your own LLM and your own agent logic, while Twilio handles the heavy lifting of real-time multimodal communication.

Whether you lead a team that ships agents or are about to start, you’ll leave knowing which parts are worth building yourself and which aren’t.

Takeaways

  • Recognize where glue code between voice and text agents breaks down
  • See how a platform-owned conversation thread replaces custom state sharing
  • Decide what your team should own (the LLM, the behavior) and what it shouldn’t (the thread)
16:45

Next Steps AMA

Preparing for the role of Principal Engineer

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of a Principal Engineer.

+ More

Next Steps AMA

Preparing for the role of Principal Engineer

16:45 – 17:15

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for preparing for the role of a Principal Engineer.

  • FEATURING
    Justin Abrahms
    Principal EngineerParloa

    Justin Abrahms is a Principal Engineer at Parloa.

    View Justin’s profile
  • Bartosz Ocytko
    Executive Principal EngineerZalando

    Bartosz is an Executive Principal Engineer at Zalando’s eCommerce Platform, where he is responsible for group-wide B2C business and Developer Platforms that serve over 50m customers. Bartosz leads and contributes to strategic and group-wide engineering initiatives for platform capabilities, customer-facing products, and more recently focused on engineering productivity, GenAI, and Machine Learning. In the past 8+ years, he has role modeled the senior individual contributor track at Zalando, mentored engineers throughout their senior IC growth journeys, and helped set up Zalando’s Principal Engineering Community.

    View Bartosz’s profile
  • Shadi Sharaf
    Principal EngineerClave

    Principal Engineer with 20+ years of experience architecting distributed systems at scale, within the publishing, media, banking, and education industries. Open source contributor, Linux Foundation project committee member, tech speaker, student mentor, and local meetup organizer. Deep expertise in enterprise high-traffic scalable distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, large-scale migrations, supply chain security, performance optimization, and Agentic AI integrations.

    Proven track record of leading cross-functional high-performing teams, implementing agile practices, growth-oriented initiatives, and experimentation cultures.

    View Shadi ‘s profile
  • Laís Oliveira
    Principal EngineerNubank

    Born and raised in Brazil, based in Berlin, Laís Oliveira is a marathonist, outdoor sports enthusiast and a Principal Engineer at Nubank. She holds a bachelor in Computer Science and a MBA in Software Engineering both graduated in São Paulo. Over the years she has built large scale systems for retail and financial industries, including building Nubank since early days from 12 thousand to 70 million customers. As a technical leader her areas of interest are functional programming, software architecture and cloud Infrastructure.

    View Laís’s profile
16:45

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

Writing the playbook for Hiring Juniors

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

+ More

Solution Talk

Writing the playbook for Hiring Juniors

16:45 – 17:00

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

In partnership with:

CodeYourFuture LeadDev

How do companies hire and attract talent today? The rules of early-career hiring have been overturned. How do we adapt to the new rules and create sustainable teams?

  • FEATURING
    Germán Bencci
    Founder & CEOCodeYourFuture

    Germán is the founder of CodeYourFuture, a community-led organization offering inclusive software development training to people from refugee and low-income backgrounds. In doing so, CodeYourFuture enables individuals to start thriving careers in the tech industry. Previously, Germán held roles in Open Innovation, produced artistic events and managed fundraising campaigns. He holds degrees in Electronics Engineering and Comparative Literature.

    View Germán ‘s profile
18:15

Contributor AMA

Become a LeadDev Contributor AMA

Join the LeadDev content team to explore ways to share your experience and get involved as a contributor.

+ More

Contributor AMA

Become a LeadDev Contributor AMA

18:15 – 18:45

Want to contribute to LeadDev but not sure where to start?

Join the LeadDev content team for a relaxed AMA session where you can ask questions about getting involved.

Whether you are interested in speaking on stage, writing an article, or hosting a meetup, this session will guide you through the process. You will learn how to create strong speaker submissions and engaging article proposals, and discover how to take your first step toward becoming a LeadDev contributor.

  • FEATURING
    Michael Hill
    Managing EditorLeadDev

    Michael is a senior editor, journalist, and content strategist with over 10 years’ experience delivering high-impact content across digital, webinars, podcasts, video, print, and live events. He is a proven leader of editorial strategy for global B2B publications, with a strong track record in audience growth, community and thought leadership, commercial projects, and cross-functional collaboration. Michael is passionate about shaping compelling editorial narratives that inform, engage, and drive measurable impact.

    View Michael’s profile
  • Ruth Yarnit
    CEO & Co-founderLeadDev

    Ruth Yarnit co-founded White October Events with Dave Fletcher in 2013 to run human-centred events for the tech industry. The White October Events team creates content and conferences for the leaders and changemakers in software engineering teams around the world, developing their tech, team and tools to advance their businesses. Lead Dev is their flagship event with conferences in London, New York, Berlin and San Francisco. Ruth is interested in human beings and teams, both in her own business and in the wider tech industry. Outside of work she is particularly interested in two small human beings, aged 1 and 3.

    View Ruth’s profile
Main Stage
08:00–09:15

Registration and refreshments

09:15

Talk

Introduction from your host: Pat Kua

A welcome from the host.

+ More

Talk

Introduction from your host: Pat Kua

09:15 – 09:40

A welcome from the host.
09:40

Talk

Staff+•Tech Lead

The new tech debt: How AI is changing the way our systems fail

Protect architectural coherence as AI accelerates code generation using stronger system boundaries, review signals, and feedback loops.

+ More

Talk

The new tech debt: How AI is changing the way our systems fail

09:40 – 10:10

This session is suitable for:

Staff+ Tech Lead

AI-assisted development increases code generation speed faster than teams can fully understand or reason about systems, creating a new form of technical debt driven by accumulating complexity, inconsistent abstractions, and loss of design intent.

This talk explores how AI shifts software failure modes and why traditional safeguards like code review and architecture governance struggle under high-velocity generation.

Attendees will leave with practical approaches to mitigate AI-driven debt, including strengthening system boundaries, improving review signals, and building feedback loops that preserve architectural coherence at scale.

  • FEATURING
    Bhavana Hindupur
    Staff Software EngineerAirbnb

    Bhavana Hindupur is a Staff Software Engineer at Airbnb, with prior experience at Meta, Google, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs. She works at the intersection of large-scale systems design, engineering execution, and organisational effectiveness, with a focus on how complex systems behave in real-world environments where architecture, team structure, and decision-making are tightly coupled. She is passionate about building products that solve real-world problems and is actively shaping how the role of engineers is evolving in the AI era—where increased code generation is shifting the bottleneck from implementation to system understanding, coherence, and long-term maintainability.

    View Bhavana’s profile
10:10

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Talk by Cloudflare

More details coming soon.

+ More

Talk

Talk by Cloudflare

10:10 – 10:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Cloudflare LeadDev

More details of the talk coming soon.
10:20

Talk

Acceleration with AI

What it takes to accelerate engineering with AI while maintaining the systems, culture, and reliability needed to scale.

+ More

Talk

Acceleration with AI

10:20 – 10:50

Darragh Curran has spent over a decade building Fin’s engineering culture, and he knows what it takes to ship quickly while keeping things running smoothly. As CTO, he leads the teams behind hundreds of deployments a day across thousands of hosts and clusters. Before Fin, he built his experience at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Amazon and IBM, so he has seen speed and scale from every angle.

Join Darragh as he talks about how Fin doubled its R&D productivity with AI, and the culture and mindset behind that shift.

  • FEATURING
    Darragh Curran
    Chief Technology OfficerFin

    Darragh Curran is the Chief Technology Officer at Fin, leading Product Engineering, Growth Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, and IT teams. He has scaled and evolved engineering teams and culture at Fin since 2012.His background spans startups like Newbay and Ticketsolve, the web product consultancy Contrast, agile software consultancy Exoftware, and large multinationals including IBM and Amazon.

    Darragh pioneered Fin’s approach to shipping fast and early, publicly sharing the philosophy and building the internal systems that coordinate all of Fin’s infrastructure – capable of hundreds of deployments a day across thousands of hosts and clusters. He holds a B.A. in (Mod) Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin, where he was awarded a scholarship for standout academic achievement.

    View Darragh’s profile
10:50–11:35

Morning Break

11:35

Talk

Experienced Manager

Leading deeper with AI

How AI lets senior engineering managers lead deeper into the technical core of their teams, and into the customer’s seat.

+ More

Talk

Leading deeper with AI

11:35 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager

How AI lets senior engineering managers lead deeper into the technical core of their teams, and into the customer’s seat

The discourse around AI and engineering management is mostly panic: managers drifting back to coding, leadership work leaking out, the productivity story breaking down at the manager layer. I want to argue the opposite.

I run a portfolio of teams whose technical core I have, historically, never quite been able to reach: hardware test infrastructure, developer tooling, documentation systems. The cost of getting deep enough to be useful in those domains used to be prohibitive for a senior manager. That cost has collapsed.

I’m diving into code and architecture I would have delegated past last year. I’m prototyping inside areas of deep team expertise I previously had to take on faith. I’m picking up customer-side work end-to-end and becoming the user of the thing my team ships, because the barrier to understanding an unfamiliar domain has dropped to near zero.

This is not a leader regressing to IC. It is a leader gaining access to two zones the role was always implicitly excluded from: depth inside the team’s technical core, and the customer’s seat. Both are high-leverage and… both are easy to do badly.

This talk is what I’ve learned about leading deeper without leaking the rest: where manager-coding accelerates team value, where it displaces it, and what changes when “I can be in the weeds with you” is the energy leaders bring to their team.

It is a defense of the manager who codes, and a sharper rule for what they should code on.

Takeaways:

  • The two zones of high-leverage work that AI now makes accessible to senior engineering managers, and why delegation alone could never reach them.
  • A practical rule for deciding when manager coding compounds team value versus when it quietly displaces it, particularly in platform, infrastructure, and tooling teams (while still applying to product engineering organizations).
  • How being able to say, “I can be in the weeds with you,” changes leadership conversations, and what leaders should invest in to remain technically credible.
  • Where the line between “delegate” and “engage with” has shifted now that AI has lowered the cost of diving deep into technical work.


  • FEATURING
    Jasmine James Fuller
    Senior Engineering Manager, Hardware Developer Platform + Docs EngBlock

    Jasmine James is a Senior Engineering Manager at Block, where she leads developer-experience teams across hardware test infrastructure, developer tooling, and documentation engineering. She previously led Engineering Effectiveness at Twitter and co-chaired KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA,and EU. She spoke at LeadDev London 2022, joined the LeadDev Advisory Board in 2024, and writes and speaks about what senior engineering managers actually do, versus what they’re often expected to pretend they do.

    View Jasmine ‘s profile
12:05

Talk

Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

The AI-augmented EM: Rebuilding how I lead

How one engineering manager used AI to reclaim time, sharpen decisions, and become a more effective leader.

+ More

Talk

The AI-augmented EM: Rebuilding how I lead

12:05 – 12:35

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Tech Lead

A hands-on case study of how one Engineering Manager rebuilt their entire workflow—people development, product strategy, and project planning—by integrating AI tools into daily leadership practice at a hyper-growth sports-tech company.

Two years ago, I was drowning. As the sole leader of a brand-new product at Sofascore—a sports-tech company that had grown from 30 to 250+ employees in 3 years—I was doing market analysis, writing tickets, leading a cross-functional team, reviewing every pull request, and still coding half my week. I needed 60 hours to fit into 40. Something had to break, and I decided it wouldn’t be me.

This talk is the story of what I built instead: an AI-augmented Engineering Manager workflow that fundamentally changed how I lead people, products, and projects.

I’ll share three concrete transformations from my real experience launching Sofascore Fantasy (from a Croatian alpha test with 20K users to a global product in 2 years) and building out our NHL product coverage.

First step: People. How I moved from reviewing every line of code to coaching engineers through structured career plans—including my current 18-month plan to grow an introverted but technically brilliant engineer into a senior role. I’ll share how four engineers I hired as students from our Android Academy are now strong mid-to-senior contributors after years of intentional mentorship.

Second step: Product. How I used Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT to conduct competitive analysis, map our data provider’s API coverage, run market-fit research, and cross-reference it with real UX research—giving me the clarity to make better prioritisation decisions, faster.

Third step: Projects. How I learned to draw the line on my own responsibilities, delegate with precision, and advocate for the hires that would make my team scalable—moving from “I do everything” to “I enable everyone.”

This is not a talk about AI replacing managers. It’s about a manager who was stretched to the limit, used AI to reclaim clarity, and became a better leader because of it. Attendees will leave with a practical, honest playbook they can start applying immediately.

Takeaways:

  • Identify which parts of your EM workflow (research, planning, analysis) AI can meaningfully accelerate—and which it cannot replace (coaching, judgment, trust-building).
  • Apply a practical framework for drawing the line on your personal responsibilities so you can delegate with clarity instead of guilt.
  • Use AI tools to conduct competitive analysis, API mapping, and market research that would otherwise take weeks—compressing your strategic decision-making cycle.
  • Build structured, long-term career development plans for engineers at different stages—from academy hires to senior promotions—using project-based coaching.
  • Recognise the early warning signs of an unsustainable leadership workload and take concrete steps to redesign your role before burnout hits.


  • FEATURING
    Toni Bakarčić
    Engineering ManagerSofascore

    Toni Bakarčić is an Engineering Manager at Sofascore, where he leads a cross-functional team building Fantasy and NHL products used by fans worldwide. Over a decade in IT and eight years at the company, he navigated its growth from 30 to over 350 employees—transitioning from Android Engineer to strategic leader responsible for product launches, team development, and AI-augmented management workflows. For three years, Toni designed and led Sofascore’s Android Academy, hiring and mentoring junior engineers who remain core contributors today. He is passionate about using technical depth and modern tooling to drive organisational clarity and sustainable team growth.

    View Toni’s profile
12:35

Talk

Director+•Staff+

Humans in the AI SDLC: In control, not in the way!

As AI agents take over software delivery, learn where human oversight remains essential and how regulation is reshaping engineering roles.

+ More

Talk

Humans in the AI SDLC: In control, not in the way!

12:35 – 12:45

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Staff+

Sponsored by:

LaunchDarkly LeadDev

As agents take over the output in an AI software factory, humans aren’t disappearing; they are required to stay in control, by law.

The AI software factory is real: agents can now write code, review pull requests, validate releases, and ship changes continuously and autonomously, tasks that used to take entire teams. It’s tempting to read this as humans becoming the ones in the way or disappearing entirely.

But they are not disappearing, their roles are changing. In this new setup, agents do the heavy lifting while humans run the factory, staying in control by setting intent, policy, and safeguards.

And humans in control isn’t just good practice, or a courtesy extended to nervous teams and leaders: The EU AI Act makes it a regulatory requirement for high-risk AI systems.

This talk explores what roles actually look like in the new AI-powered SDLC: what can run automatically, what still needs human oversight, and how regulation is already starting to draw that line for you!

Key takeaways

  • Role shift: human involvement isn’t disappearing — it’s changing.
  • Regulation: the EU AI Act is making human oversight a requirement, not just best practice.
  • The line: what’s safe to automate, and what still needs a human.
  • FEATURING
    Ciarán Flynn
    Senior Solutions Engineer LaunchDarkly

    Ciarán Flynn is a Senior Solutions Engineer at LaunchDarkly, where he works with engineering teams rethinking how software gets built and shipped as AI agents enter the pipeline. He spends most of his time with organisations trying to move faster without losing control of what reaches their customers, a problem that gets considerably harder when code is being written by something other than a human.

    View Ciarán’s profile
12:45

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+

Software doesn’t know how to die

We build systems to scale, evolve, and survive failures – but rarely to tell us when they are ready to die. This talk explores why “letting go” should become a strategic engineering capability.

+ More

Talk

Software doesn’t know how to die

12:45 – 13:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+

We build systems to scale, evolve, and survive failures – but rarely to tell us when they are ready to die. This talk explores why “letting go” should become a strategic engineering capability.

Modern engineering organizations are incredibly good at creating software. We can spin up services in hours, generate code with AI, and track growth through sophisticated KPIs. But most organizations still have no mature way to answer a much harder question:

“How do we know when something should stop existing?”

For years, the software industry optimized for growth. Today, many organizations face a different reality: shifting markets, flatter structures, shrinking capacity, and increasing operational pressure. Meanwhile, AI is lowering the cost of generating code faster than we can sustainably maintain it.

The result is an uncomfortable asymmetry: we create software faster than we can build the capacity to understand, operate, simplify, and retire it.

At XING, this tension became impossible to ignore as we tried to sustain a legacy ecosystem while simultaneously reducing complexity across the organization. We uncovered a cultural blind spot: we nurture systems to scale, evolve, and survive failures — but rarely to tell us when they are ready to die.

Systems quietly become immortal. Operational burden becomes invisible.

AI didn’t create this problem, but it made the gap impossible to ignore. As software creation accelerates, we are suddenly forced to ask questions our systems were never designed to answer:

How sustainable is this long term? What is the real cost of keeping it alive? How do we know when complexity outweighs value?

These shouldn’t be reactive questions asked only during organizational pressure. They are questions we should design our systems and organizations to answer from day one.

In this talk, I’ll share the technical, operational, and emotional realities of treating “letting go” as a core engineering capability: what worked, what failed, and how we started shifting our culture to see simplification, retirement, and reduction as necessary parts of sustainable engineering.

This is not a talk about deleting software. It’s about creating systems that can tell us when they are no longer worth carrying.

Takeaways:

  • The uncomfortable realization that your organization may already be carrying more software than it can sustainably understand, operate, or retire
  • Practical signals that systems, services, or platforms are becoming “immortal”
  • Ways to make simplification, retirement, and lifecycle thinking part of sustainable engineering culture
  • The psychology of “less”: how to counter emotional attachment to systems, reframe retirement as capacity creation, and reward simplification instead of accumulation


  • FEATURING
    Laura Grau Ramírez
    Engineering Director XING

    Laura Grau is an engineering director at XING. She is a leader focused on organizational design, engineering sustainability, and guiding teams through complexity and change. She has experience scaling teams, driving agile transformation, and leading engineering organizations through periods of growth, restructuring, and operational evolution.

    Laura believes leadership is not defined by hierarchy, but by presence, positive influence, and helping others grow. She is particularly interested in how organizations build software sustainably – balancing delivery, long-term system health, and the human side of engineering.

    Alongside her leadership work, she also teaches engineering management and leadership topics through online learning platforms, bringing a practical and people-centered perspective to modern engineering organizations.

    View Laura ‘s profile
13:15–14:45

Lunch Break

14:45

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager

Hey candidate, please blink if you’re human

How to find real human candidates in the hackstack of AI applications.

+ More

Talk

Hey candidate, please blink if you’re human

14:45 – 15:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager

How to find real human candidates in the hackstack of AI applications.

I never thought I’d miss the days of reviewing terribly designed and grammatically lacking resumes for engineers, but in 2026 here I am. AI has offered great efficiencies in hiring – but it’s become impossible to differentiate good candidates from bad ones, let alone humans from AI bots. Our hiring pipelines have become AI against AI, and no one is winning. If you’ve struggled to hire, or even interview, a real person, I invite you to learn from my strategies of how to recruit, filter, and find real people to join your engineering teams. I’ll present real ATS data of trying to hire a Principal Engineer in 2026, share tips for helping human candidates punch through the application noise, and present strategies on how to monitor changes in patterns of AI verbiage as they evolve. (looking at you, emdash)

Takeaways:

  • Understanding how AI has impacted the hiring landscape
  • Building empathy for candidates trying to find work
  • Gaining strategies to filter and interview real candidates
  • Resources to give to non-technical recruiters to help with screening


  • FEATURING
    Jennifer Wadella
    Engineering ManagerChromatic

    Often described as a force of nature, Jennifer is a visionary leader with a proven track record in management excellence and leading software teams to successful execution of business goals.

    With deep roots in frontend engineering Jennifer is still widely regarded as an expert in the Angular space despite her growing tenure in non-coding management roles. Jennifer combines years of experience in developing JavaScript applications through interfacing with users, stakeholders and business executives with a keen eye on the current development landscape & trends to craft strategic vision and lead teams to sustainable growth that contributes to company success.

    Jennifer is passionate about developer communities, and shares her expertise in frontend development, engineering management, maximizing productivity, and community building across the world as a widely sought-after public speaker. She is also the founder of Kansas City Women in Technology, a non-profit that has taught thousands of women and girls in the Kansas City area to code, and helped women enter tech careers.

    View Jennifer’s profile
15:15

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Talk by Factory

More details coming soon.

+ More

Talk

Talk by Factory

15:15 – 15:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Factory.ai LeadDev

More details of the talk coming soon.
15:25

Talk

Beyond specialists: How GetYourGuide is rethinking who ships AI

See how the right platform and enablement can help software engineers build and ship production-grade AI products.

+ More

Talk

Beyond specialists: How GetYourGuide is rethinking who ships AI

15:25 – 15:55

For years, shipping AI products meant relying on a narrow group of specialists — data scientists, ML engineers, researchers. At GetYourGuide, we made a different bet: with the right platform and the right enablement, regular software engineers can build production-grade AI products too.

In this talk, Mathieu Bastian, Principal AI Engineer, shares the journey of building an AI Platform that shifts AI development into the hands of the broader engineering organization. He’ll walk through the programs put in place to enable this shift, the cultural and technical challenges along the way, and the honest learnings from leading this transformation.

  • FEATURING
    Mathieu Bastian
    Principal AI EngineerGetYourGuide

    Mathieu is a Principal AI Engineer at GetYourGuide, focusing on agentic AI and AI platforms. At GetYourGuide, he led the Data Products group as a Director of Engineering from 2016 to 2023. He previously worked at LinkedIn as a Staff Data Scientist and Engineering Manager. Mathieu also co-founded Gephi, an award-winning large graph visualisation platform.

    View Mathieu’s profile
15:55–16:35

Afternoon Break

16:35

Talk

Experienced Manager•Tech Lead

Where did all your tokens go? Measuring coding agent impact with OpenTelemetry

Coding agents like Claude Code are reshaping how your team ships software, but how are you evaluating them? This talk is about using OpenTelemetry to measure their real impact on DORA metrics.

+ More

Talk

Where did all your tokens go? Measuring coding agent impact with OpenTelemetry

16:35 – 17:05

This session is suitable for:

Experienced Manager Tech Lead

Coding agents like Claude Code are reshaping how your team ships software, but how are you evaluating them? This talk is about using OpenTelemetry to measure their real impact on DORA metrics.

I tried out viral Claude Code ‘hacks’ and measured how effective they really are.

Agentic coding tools like Claude Code have inserted themselves into the critical path of software development. But we were still evaluating our vibe coding the same way – on vibes. This doesn’t scale across an organisation.

We realised there’s a hidden layer: your development workflow is now observable. You can measure how software gets built, not just what gets deployed.

How? These tools aren’t just generating code, they’re emitting OpenTelemetry data like token usage, latency, acceptance rates, and pull request counts. But most teams aren’t capturing it, so they’re flying blind while these tools shape delivery performance and DORA metrics. By observing your coding agents, you can understand their real impact: where they accelerate delivery, where they introduce risk, and how they affect lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR.

In this talk, I’ll show how we started treating coding agents as production dependencies, not assistants, and share what we learned, what didn’t work, and how we’re getting the most value from this data.

The teams that get the most value from AI won’t be the ones using it the most, they’ll be the ones who can see and optimise what it’s doing.

Takeaways:

  • What data leaders should measure
  • How leaders can use this data to improve delivery performance
  • How to answer questions like: Is AI actually making us faster? Where are we introducing risk? Which tools are worth standardising on?


  • FEATURING
    Annie Freeman
    Developer AdvocateCoralogix

    Annie is a Developer Advocate at Coralogix, where she connects with developers to spark conversations about smarter observability and how to connect deep technical metrics with outcomes that matter. As a Green Software Champion, Annie also advocates for reducing the environmental impact of software and empowering developers to create solutions that are both impactful and sustainable. Originally from New Zealand, she brings a warm, community-focussed approach to her talks and content. Prior to Coralogix, she was a software engineer at Xero.

    View Annie’s profile
17:05

Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager

The three conflicting ‘goods’ of engineering management

Learn to separate what’s rewarded, what works, and what’s right to lead effectively through shifting business cycles.

+ More

Talk

The three conflicting 'goods' of engineering management

17:05 – 17:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager

Organisations conflate three definitions of “good” engineering management: what’s rewarded, what works, and what’s ‘right’. Telling them apart builds careers resilient across business cycles, and explains why the AI shift feels so disorienting.

“Good management” has always been a debate in the technical community, but the rise of AI-driven redundancies has put a spotlight on middle management and non-technical leadership. When Big Tech makes dramatic shifts, other organisations are tempted to follow suit, sometimes without considering their individual context.

AI is forcing a step-change across technical ways of working with cultural implications. Leaders need to reconsider what “good management” means, or risk the definition happening to them; changing workflows, team structures, and fundamental expectations about technical leadership. However, this isn’t the first time… what counts as good management shifts with business cycles, not because of moral evolution, but because business needs change.

In the early 2000s, good managers navigated organisational politics and left engineers alone. In the 2010s when money was cheap, good managers stopped coding to focus on attracting and retaining talent. In the 2020s, as cheap capital dried up, good managers are expected to be hands-on again as organisations flatten for efficiency. Now some suggest software engineering itself may become more like ‘agent management’, looking less like traditional development and more like coordination.

Each era ended up creating a philosophy that explained why these approaches mattered. The 2010s framed delegation as “empowering engineers is fundamentally good,” not “capital is cheap, hire aggressively.” The 2020s frame technical depth as “bureaucratic management has made us stale,” not “funding ended, cut costs.” These narratives can become leadership identities rather than operating models, making it harder to see what’s actually driving change.

The confusion comes from conflating three types of “good”:

  • Performative good – what gets rewarded right now, or by your company.
  • Contextual good – what works given current reality, often specific to your org.
  • Moral good – what *you* believe is right, often internalised narratives from your formative era.

The AI shift compounds this challenge. While business cycles are cyclical, technological complexity only accumulates – Cloud, distributed systems, AI – each raised the baseline for what understanding systems means.

This talk provides frameworks for distinguishing what’s actually happening from the stories we tell ourselves, identifying which skills are foundational versus era-specific, and building careers resilient across inevitable future shifts.

Key takeaways

  • The three-goods framework (what’s rewarded, what works, what’s right) reveals where your context and your values are out of sync.
  • Your management instincts are calibrated to the era you trained in, not necessarily the one you’re operating in now.
  • Distinguishing era-laundered habit from genuine conviction requires naming the conditions under which you formed each belief.
  • Conflicts about “”good management”” often reflect era mismatches, not skill gaps; your peer may simply be right about a different context.
  • How to identify which skills compound across eras, so you invest your development time where it survives context change.
  • FEATURING
    Rachael Wonnacott
    Global Head of Software and Applied AI Engineering

    Rachael Wonnacott recently joined Capital Group as Global Head of Software and Applied AI Engineering in the Enterprise Data Office, building where machine learning meets the application lifecycle to make processes AI-native. She came to management in early 2023, into the efficiency era, with no hypergrowth playbook. That meant interrogating the definition of “good management”, not inheriting one from a more forgiving moment. With a decade as an engineer, she watched the standard shift and saw engineers resist management styles from different eras, not because those styles were wrong, but because they were calibrated to conditions that no longer exist. A regular speaker at QCon, KubeCon, AWS Summit and founding-organiser of FastFlowConf.

     

    View Rachael’s profile
17:35

Talk

End of day wrap-up

Closing thoughts from the host, Pat Kua.

+ More

Talk

End of day wrap-up

17:35 – 17:50

Closing thoughts from the host, Pat Kua.
WORKSHOP Zone
09:20

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Translating up: Engineering advocacy for the C-suite

Learn to frame technical initiatives in business terms, win executive support, and drive strategic engineering investments forward.

+ More

Workshop

Translating up: Engineering advocacy for the C-suite

09:20 – 10:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

CircleCI Logo LeadDev

You know what needs to change. You see the technical opportunities clearly. But when you bring initiatives to executives, they hear “risky change” not “controlled experiment.” The result? Great ideas die in planning, technical debt compounds, and your team runs obsolete processes while competitors experiment their way forward.

The gap isn’t your technical competence—it’s translation. Executives operate in a different context with different constraints and accountabilities. They evaluate initiatives using frameworks like opportunity cost, customer impact, and risk management. Most staff+ engineers never learn to speak this language.

In this workshop, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber pulls back the curtain on how executives actually evaluate technical initiatives. You’ll learn how to better communicate and leverage technical frameworks to shift perception from “this sounds risky” to “this is a smart opportunity.” Discover how to frame experimentation as hypothesis testing, turn one-way doors into two-way doors, and position engineering investments using the same frameworks executives use for any strategic decision.

You’ll leave with practical tools to drive better alignment between your engineering and the board so you can advocate for and focus on outcomes that drive the business forward.

  • FEATURING
    Rob Zuber
    CTOCircleCI

    Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups; a three-time founder, and a five-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 150+ engineers distributed worldwide.

    View Rob’s profile
11:35

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Introduction to architecting for AI

Learn how to architect AI agents for production, navigate agentic workflows, and address security challenges through practical, discussion-based learning.

  • Sam Newman Sam Newman & Associates
    Independent Tech Consultant & Author
+ More

Workshop

Introduction to architecting for AI

11:35 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

O'Reilly x LeadDev

Embedding AI agents into your production software creates a host of challenges when considering how your architecture needs to change. In this workshop you’ll get to grips with what agentic AI needs to run effectively in production, the pros and cons of agentic workflow, and how to architect with security in mind.

Please note, this is not a coding workshop – it is a discussion-based workshop where as a group we explore architectural and technical aspects. Laptops are totally optional!

  • FEATURING
    Sam Newman
    Independent Tech Consultant & AuthorSam Newman & Associates
    Sam Newman is an independent consultant who loves solving problems with technology. Focusing primarily in the areas of cloud, microservice architecture and continuous delivery, Sam works with companies big and small all over the world. He is also an experienced conference speaker, and author of the O’Reilly books Monolith To Microservices, Building Microservices, and the forthcoming Building Resilient Distributed Systems.
    View Sam’s profile
11:35

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Build your leadership manifesto

Define your leadership values, challenge your assumptions, and create a personal manifesto to guide confident, impactful decisions.

+ More

Workshop

Build your leadership manifesto

11:35 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Leadership in an uncertain world is tough, but having a strong personal north star can help you navigate stormy waters. A leadership manifesto can help you understand the real reasons you do what you do and give you a clear set of guidelines that makes decision-making with impact much easier.

The workshop will challenge your perceptions on what makes you a good leader and why you make the choices you make in leadership. It’s hands-on, crafty and interactive, a bit daft but with a real, tangible takeaway.
11:35

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Beyond the benchmark: How to evaluate coding agents for real production success

Build trusted, production-ready evaluations for coding agents using criteria tailored to your architecture, workflows, standards, and risks.

+ More

Workshop

Beyond the benchmark: How to evaluate coding agents for real production success

11:35 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

AI coding agents can look amazing in a demo and still fail quietly in production. The benchmark scores look great, the PoC gets approved, and three months later… nothing ships, or worse: incidents spike and trust collapses.

Why? Because benchmarks don’t measure what your organization actually needs.

This workshop is for engineering leaders and senior ICs who are responsible for deciding whether, where, and how to adopt coding agents. Instead of relying on vendor benchmarks or generic evaluation frameworks, we’ll build a custom evaluation system tailored to your specific context: your architecture patterns, your coding standards, your team’s actual workflows. Through hands-on exercises, group critiques, and real examples, you’ll build your own evaluation rubric that you can defend to stakeholders and actually trust.

You’ll leave with a concrete, reusable toolkit to run coding agent evaluations on your terms, with metrics that matter to your organization.

This workshop focuses on designing custom evaluations for coding agents that reflect your production reality. We’ll move beyond vendor-supplied benchmark scores and into domain-specific assessment frameworks.

Benchmarks tell you how an agent performs on synthetic, simplified tasks. Your custom evals tell you whether it can produce code your team will merge, maintain, and trust. We’ll explore a pragmatic framework for translating your actual constraints—legacy architecture, compliance requirements, team skill distribution, incident response patterns—into concrete, testable evaluation criteria that give you a structured way to say “yes” or “no” with confidence.

  • FEATURING
    Fabian Friedl
    Co-FounderStraion

    Fabian Friedl is the Co-Founder of Straion.

    View Fabian’s profile
  • Katrin Freihofner
    Co-founderStraion

    Katrin Freihofner is a versatile professional with extensive experience in product management, user experience design, and software engineering. Throughout her career, she has excelled in key roles at companies like Elastic and Dynatrace. She successfully led distributed and cross-functional teams, established end-to-end user journeys, and played a crucial role in shaping product strategies. Currently a Co-Founder at Straion, Katrin has a proven track record of developing innovative solutions. She thrives in collaborative, fast-paced environments and maintains a strong commitment to leadership and continuous learning

    View profile
14:45

Workshop

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Influencing without authority

A hands-on workshop to help engineering leaders influence decisions, align stakeholders, and move work forward without direct authority.

+ More

Workshop

Influencing without authority

14:45 – 16:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

A hands-on lab for engineering leaders. We’ll work through the messiness of getting things done when you don’t have direct authority — translating technical reality for execs, negotiating across functions, and getting decisions unstuck. You’ll leave with some templates and a rough influence plan you can actually use.

  • FEATURING
    Kaushik Chaubal
    Senior Engineering DirectorBlackRock

    Kaushik Chaubal is a Senior Engineering Director at BlackRock. He is the global head for Liquidity Automation Engineering within Investor Solutions at BlackRock. In the last decade and a half, he has led multiple teams across Product, Platform and Data Engineering, including leading the strategic AI Centre of Excellence.

    View Kaushik’s profile
DirectorPlus Zone
09:50

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

How can engineering leaders ship at agentic speed and still trust what reaches production?

Shipping at agentic speed requires more than faster coding. Discuss overcoming review bottlenecks while maintaining quality, security, and trust.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

How can engineering leaders ship at agentic speed and still trust what reaches production?

09:50 – 10:50

This session is suitable for:

Director+

Sponsored by:

CodeRabbit

What does it take to move from human-centered software development to fully agentic development, so teams can ship dramatically faster without sacrificing quality or security? From 100 million code reviews, we see teams solving agentic coding, but not yet agentic shipping. We hit bottlenecks in review, understanding, prioritization, and security, and clearing them is how CodeRabbit ships 10x more software without adding engineering headcount. Compare notes with other leaders and leave with a plan.

Discussion includes:

  • Where do changes get stuck on your teams today: in review, in understanding what they do, in deciding which matter most, or in security? What have you tried, and what did not work?
  • What needs to change in your teams’ workflows, roles, and responsibilities as agents take on more of the development lifecycle? When a change breaks something, can you tell who or what wrote it, what checked it, and who stands behind it?
  • Where can agents work on their own, and where do you need an independent check or human judgment? Who decides which changes a person reviews, and what stops a coding agent from approving its own change?
  • How do you measure progress while keeping quality, security, and trust in what ships? If your teams merged twice as many changes next quarter, what would warn you that quality was dropping?
  • FEATURING
    David Loker
    VP of AICodeRabbit

    David Loker is the VP of AI at CodeRabbit, where he leads the development of agentic AI systems that transform code reviews and developer workflows. As an entrepreneur and award-winning researcher, he has been building large-scale machine learning and AI systems since 2007 and coding since childhood. He has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles in leading conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, and AAAI, and was an early pioneer in generative AI. From founding startups to hands-on engineering, David brings deep technical rigor and product-oriented vision, driving applied AI innovations that bridge cutting-edge research and real-world value.

    View David’s profile
11:35

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Director+

Managing Managers when everything is changing

Discuss how to support struggling managers, lead them through change, and build their confidence to act independently.

+ More

DirectorPlus Roundtables

Managing Managers when everything is changing

11:35 – 12:35

This session is suitable for:

Director+

A roundtable on how senior engineering leaders build and sustain a strong management layer as organizations grow, flatten, and face increasing pressure.

Managing managers is one of the hardest transitions in a senior leader’s career. The people in this layer are expected to hold their teams steady – often while the leaders above them are still working things out. This session focuses on the practical, often uncomfortable decisions that come with the role.

Discussion includes:

  • How to give a manager the feedback and support they need when they’re struggling but not failing – and when to call it
  • How to lead your managers through upheaval when they need to stay steady for their teams while you’re still figuring it out yourself
  • How to build managers who can operate with genuine autonomy as organizations flatten and layers of oversight disappear
  • FEATURING
    Sarah Abrantes
    VP of EngineeringAdyen

    Sarah is an experienced leader who has helped level up engineering leads over the last years in organizations such as GoEuro, N26, GetYourGuide and Tier Mobility, having recently joined Adyen as VP of Engineering.

    She has led 100+ people organizations with a strong focus on technical excellence and nurturing an inclusive and trustworthy culture.

    Last year, she has empathetically led her organizations through the latest market turmoil from a manager of managers position, working on strengthening culture and championing a customer-centric approach.

    View Sarah’s profile
Community Zone
11:35

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you keep infrastructure access secure without slowing developers down?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you keep infrastructure access secure without slowing developers down?

11:35 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Teleport

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Vishakha Motwani
    Senior Software Engineer
    View Vishakha’s profile
  • Mareike Ziese
    Head of Software Engineering | Data Platforms & Outbound Commercemomox SE

    Mareike Ziese is Head of Software Engineering for Data Platforms & Outbound Commerce at momox, a leading European recommerce company. She leads teams building modern data and AI platforms that power pricing, marketing optimization, and large-scale commerce operations.

    A mother of two young girls and the owner of three horses — plus countless plants in her garden — she often connects lessons from nature and family life to her leadership approach. She believes great technology and strong teams grow under the same conditions: trust, clarity, and patience.

    View Mareike’s profile
11:35

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you manage your workload with your parenthood duties, without burning out?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you manage your workload with your parenthood duties, without burning out?

11:35 – 12:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Zalando LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Dhaval Shah
    AI/BI Engineering Manager DatabricksZalando

    Dhaval Shah is an AI/BI Engineering Manager Databricks at Zalando.

    View Dhaval’s profile
  • Asima Khalid
    Staff EngineerFlagstone

    Asima Khalid is a Staff Engineer and part of Engineering Leadership group at Flagstone. She holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan, earning two Gold Medals and a National Talent Scholarship.

    A culture champion and mental health first aider, committed to empowering others and advocating for inclusivity in STEM, she mentors engineers and women in tech through the ElevateHer community. She leads with empathy and example.

    Outside work, she volunteers as a swim instructor, giving young children the confidence and safety skills to thrive in the water.

    View Asima’s profile
  • Ciro Anunciação
    Senior Engineering ManagerOn

    Ciro is a senior engineering manager with over 20 years in software, from hands-on coding to scaling teams and organizations. He built teams from the ground up, like growing a startup from 1 to 30 engineers. And he led product-driven engagement at Babbel, where his team boosted retention year over year. At PandaDoc, he shaped growth-focused engineering teams and sustainable processes. Today, he’s part of On, continuing his journey of building high-performing teams, strong product partnerships, and preparing the next generation of leaders.

    View Ciro’s profile
11:35

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Neurodivergent leaders

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Neurodivergent leaders

11:35 – 12:05

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.
12:35

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you measure how well your team uses AI?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you measure how well your team uses AI?

12:35 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Fin LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Kuba Niechcial
    VP of EngineeringFin

    Kuba Niechcial is a VP of Engineering at Fin.

    View Kuba’s profile
  • Daniela Matheis
    Chief of Staff to the CTOioki

    In her role as Chief of Staff to the CTO, Daniela drives practical transformations in engineering culture, ensuring continuous learning is integrated into workflows. Using systemic coaching, she supports leaders in designing initiatives, improving team practices, and creating measurable impact across the organization.

    View Daniela’s profile
  • Dmytro Mindra
    Engineering ManagerSuperhuman

    Dmytro Mindra is an Engineering Manager at Superhuman.

    View Dmytro’s profile
12:35

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Where’s the line between empowering non-engineers to build and creating a security nightmare?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

Where’s the line between empowering non-engineers to build and creating a security nightmare?

12:35 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Factory.ai LeadDev

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Lennart Uden
    Sales DACHFactory

    Lennart Uden is a Sales DACH at Factory.

    View Lennart’s profile
  • Eva M. Barabas
    Principal EngineerUK Home Office

    Eva Barabas (Eve) is a Principal Engineer at the UK Home Office, finishing a 2 year stint as Head of Role for Engineering. Her focus is engineering enablement and effectiveness: creating environments, platforms and practices that help engineers do their best work and deliver better outcomes for users. A former Ruby, JavaScript and Python engineer, Eve has spent more than a decade building technical communities, from Sheffield Ruby User Group to BCS South Yorkshire and Isle of Ruby. She cares about tech for good, inclusive communities, continuous learning, and turning big organisational challenges into practical, collaborative, safe-to-try improvements at meaningful scale.

    View Eva ‘s profile
  • Ilya Savin
    Engineering Managerflaconi

    Ilya Savin is a hands-on Engineering Manager with 10+ years in product engineering and 4 years in leadership across fintech and e-commerce. He started as an Android engineer and still likes staying close to the technical side, while today focusing on team design, developer productivity, delivery, and practical AI adoption.

    He speaks at conferences including droidcon and LeadDev about engineering leadership, AI in software development, and how engineering teams and roles are changing as AI becomes part of everyday work.

    View Ilya’s profile
12:35

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Women and Non-binary leaders

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Women and Non-binary leaders

12:35 – 13:05

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

  • FEATURING
    Syamala Umamaheswaran
    Engineering ManagerZalando

    Syamala is an engineering leader with 17 years of experience across fintech, automotive, and fashion e-commerce. She leads teams responsible for critical, high-traffic platform systems, where reliability directly affects customers, business outcomes, and team well-being.

    Her leadership focuses on creating impact through thoughtful prioritization. She balances system resilience, operational health, sustainable team practices, and product delivery. Syamala is passionate about making this work visible because scaling is not only about speed. It is about building resilient systems and empowered teams that make long-term growth possible.

    View Syamala’s profile
  • Silvia Schreier
    Principal EngineerIntersport

    As Principal Engineer and Architect at Intersport, Silvia Schreier is committed to bridging the gap between technology and business. With over a decade of experience in web development, architecture, and wholesale and retail product management, she combines deep technical expertise with a strong business perspective. Driven by her passion for collaboration and connecting people, Silvia helps teams find solutions that are not only technically sound and sustainable but also deliver real business value.

    View Silvia’s profile
  • Janina Marks
    Engineering Manager & Engineering Leadership CoachIndependent

    Janina is an Engineering Manager and Engineering Leadership Coach with a background in full-stack software engineering. Most recently, she spent over nine years at Zalando, progressing from Software Engineer to Engineering Manager and working on products with direct customer impact while collaborating with stakeholders across the organization. She is passionate about personal growth, mentoring, and helping others find their own path into leadership. Diversity and inclusion are equally important to her, and as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, she is proud to contribute to greater visibility and representation within engineering leadership.

    View Janina ‘s profile
14:00

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Who should own the risk when AI is customer-facing?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

Who should own the risk when AI is customer-facing?

14:00 – 14:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by:

Twilio

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Marius Obert
    Developer EvangelistTwilio

    Marius Obert is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio.

    View Marius’s profile
  • Sattar Falahati
    Division ManagerSpindox

    Sattar builds engineering organizations, recovers delivery when things get stuck, and grows the leaders who take over from him. With 13+ years in tech, he started hands-on and now leads leaders across 210+ engineers. He stays technical enough to challenge architecture and risk, but focuses on a bigger question: do his people have what they need to execute? His experience spans mobile, backend, and frontend, as well as coaching managers, rebuilding trust, and improving how teams hire and grow. He believes the best leaders build teams that can succeed even when they’re not in the room.

    View Sattar’s profile
  • Monica Jianu
    Fractional Engineering Leader

    Monica has spent most of her career in the messy middle of early-stage startups — building engineering teams, shaping product direction, and designing the lightweight processes that keep small companies moving fast. She’s worked across seed to Series B in healthtech and climatetech, moving between hands-on delivery, engineering management, and product leadership. She is particularly interested in figuring out why teams are stuck, turning debates into decisions, and treating process as experiment.

    View Monica’s profile
14:00

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you practically deliver value to engineering teams using AI?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you practically deliver value to engineering teams using AI?

14:00 – 14:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Ivan Milanov
    Engineering LeaderPubliCare GmbH

    Ivan Milanov is an ERP engineering leader based in Berlin, with more than 16 years of experience in Microsoft Dynamics and six years in people management. He leads teams responsible for business-critical platforms, combining technical depth with a strong focus on delivery, team development, and systems thinking. Ivan speaks internationally on engineering leadership, ethical AI, and the human side of technology. 

    View Ivan’s profile
  • Carlos Martínez Gadea
    Software Engineering ManagerExoticca

    Carlos Martínez Gadea is a Software Engineering Manager at Exoticca.

    View Carlos’s profile
  • Kaan Bobac
    Engineering ManagerZalando
    View Kaan’s profile
14:00

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Asian leaders

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting Asian leaders

14:00 – 14:30

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.

  • FEATURING
    Priyanka Bettadapura
    Senior Software EngineerMicrosoft

    Priyanka Bettadapura is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on Azure AI/ML infrastructure. With over 12 years of experience across Microsoft, Zoom, Oracle, Capillary Technologies, and Caterpillar, she has built scalable distributed systems, optimized Kubernetes clusters, and driven cloud cost savings exceeding $1M while maintaining 99.99% availability. Priyanka shares technical insights through her blog (priyankabswe.substack.com) and open-source contributions on GitHub (pribetta). She is passionate about AI/ML systems, technical leadership, and building reliable cloud infrastructure. Outside of work, she enjoys hiking, traveling, and advocating for animal welfare.

    View Priyanka’s profile
  • Ricardo Yasuda
    Engineering ManagerGotPhoto

    Ricardo is an engineering leader with 25+ years in the software development industry. Currently an Engineering Manager at GotPhoto, he leads cross-functional teams building technology that empowers photographers to focus on their craft. Ricardo previously led teams at SumUp handling millions of transactions at scale. He is passionate about people-first and culture-aware leadership, creating environments where engineers thrive while delivering products that truly serves people and makes a difference.

    View Ricardo’s profile
14:45

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you help engineers plan and grow their careers?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you help engineers plan and grow their careers?

14:45 – 15:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.

  • FEATURING
    Ugnė Kryževičiūtė
    Engineering ManagerOvoko

    Ugnė Kryževičiūtė is an Engineering Manager at Ovoko and is deeply interested in what helps individuals and teams perform at their best. Her path from customer support to engineering leadership, especially her time at Vinted, has given her a practical, human-centred approach to management. She is good at turning ambiguity into clearer processes, helps teams achieve sustainable results, and promotes open discussions about both personal and professional development. When not at work, she enjoys water-related activities such as freediving, scuba diving, and open-water swimming, and often goes on spontaneous trips mainly motivated by a desire to enjoy nature rather than by any specific plan.

    View Ugnė’s profile
  • Tomasz Dacewicz
    Senior Engineering ManagerKlarna

    Tomasz Dacewicz is a seasoned engineering leader with deep expertise in building scalable, high-impact software systems. With experience spanning startups and global organizations, he combines technical excellence with a people-first leadership style, fostering collaboration and continuous improvement within his teams. Passionate about clean architecture, mentoring, and delivering customer-focused solutions, Tom drives engineering cultures that balance innovation with reliability — helping teams ship better software, faster.

    View Tomasz’s profile
14:45

Table Talks

Director+•Experienced Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How do you influence decisions effectively as a staff+ leader?

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

+ More

Table Talks

How do you influence decisions effectively as a staff+ leader?

14:45 – 15:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Join facilitated conversations and dive into key issues facing engineering teams

There’s never a single silver bullet for any problem and often you’ll need to combine the ideas of multiple people to find the perfect solution for your team. We’ll be discussing some core issues in the Table Talk sessions, hosted by a group of engineering leaders who are on hand to provide their perspectives and help guide the conversation. You can dip in and out of discussions depending on what interests you the most.
14:45

Community Representation Groups

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Connecting leaders with disabilities

Connect with folks over shared experiences.

+ More

Community Representation Groups

Connecting leaders with disabilities

14:45 – 15:15

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Connect with folks over shared experiences

Everyone’s journey into leadership is tough, but some have a unique set of challenges that they need to navigate through. At times it can lead to leaders feeling isolated in their experiences.

We welcome you to the community representation groups, where you’ll be able to connect with folks who might have similar experiences to yours, where you’ll be able to build a peer network for support throughout your leadership journey.
Solution Zone
10:55

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Live demo: Cloudflare

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

Live demo: Cloudflare

10:55 – 11:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Cloudflare LeadDev

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.
10:55

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to scale your data infrastructure for agentic AI with Cockroach Continuum?

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to scale your data infrastructure for agentic AI with Cockroach Continuum?

10:55 – 11:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Cockroach Labs New Logo

Autonomous agents don’t wait for a sprint cycle. They create demand, scale workloads and hit your database faster than any team can respond manually, and most infrastructure wasn’t designed for that.

We’ll show what happens when continuous change becomes the default, and how CockroachDB Continuum keeps your data layer resilient, consistent and in control.
10:10

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How engineering teams are building testing workflows for AI powered velocity

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How engineering teams are building testing workflows for AI powered velocity

10:10 – 10:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Testkube LeadDev

How modern engineering teams are keeping up with AI-generated code and building the testing workflows that actually scale.
10:10

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to find the bugs your team actually wants to fix with QA.tech

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to find the bugs your team actually wants to fix with QA.tech

10:10 – 10:20

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

QA.tech LeadDev

Few teams maintain a suite that covers what matters, and the failures they do get reported are often noise developers learn to ignore. This session shows QA.tech understanding the risk in a pull request, testing the affected user journeys, and reporting an actual bug an engineer needs to fix.
11:35

Peer Hangouts

Director of Engineering Hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

Director of Engineering Hangout

11:35 – 12:05

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Mariana Pasichnyk
    Senior Engineering Director IDEMIA

    Mariana is a Senior Engineering Director of the Digital ID Platform at IDEMIA, where she leads cross-functional teams across development, QA, DevOps, and delivery. She drives engineering excellence while ensuring the delivery of scalable, secure digital identity solutions. Deeply committed to talent development and team engagement, she focuses on building high-performing teams and nurturing leadership growth. Mariana brings a collaborative, people centric approach to engineering. She combines strategic vision with strong execution to deliver impactful solutions. Outside of work, she enjoys running, swimming, hiking in the mountains, learning tennis, and mentoring others.

    View Mariana’s profile
  • Josh Winfield-Harris
    Engineering & Delivery DirectorNeuron

    Josh Winfield-Harris is an Engineering & Delivery Director at Neuron.

    View Josh ‘s profile
  • Anita Singh
    Director of EngineeringLyft

    Anita is an engineering leader passionate about building delightful user experiences and helping teams create quality software that users love. She began her career at larger public tech companies before moving into the startup world, working across Silicon Valley and Berlin, where she’s helped scale teams, culture, processes, and software from the ground up. In her current role, she enjoys coaching engineering managers and staff engineers.

    View Anita’s profile
11:35

Next Steps AMA

The path to CTO

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for the path to CTO.

+ More

Next Steps AMA

The path to CTO

11:35 – 12:05

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for the path to CTO.

  • FEATURING
    Jonathan Behr
    CTO / VP of EngineeringFM
    View Jonathan’s profile
  • Carina Grühser
    CTOInterhome

    Carina Grühser is the CTO at Interhome.

    View Carina’s profile
  • Christian Dewein
    Chief Technology Officerioki

    Christian Dewein is a software engineer and CTO based in Frankfurt am Main. He leads the development of innovative mobility solutions for public transport at ioki GmbH, a Deutsche Bahn subsidiary. Passionate about technology, community building, and elegant software design, he actively contributes to open-source projects and local developer meetups. Christian values simplicity, craftsmanship, and the intersection of code and real-world impact. Besides that, he organizes Europe’s biggest conference for mechanical computer keyboards, a free community-event for fans of the hobby.

    View Christian’s profile
12:15

Peer Hangouts

VP of Engineering Hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

VP of Engineering Hangout

12:15 – 12:45

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Stephen Strike
    SVP of EngineeringInterplay Learning

    Stephen StrikeStephen Strike is an SVP of Engineering at Interplay Learning.

    View Stephen’s profile
  • Dilip Saha
    VP of Engineering

    Dilip Saha is a VP of Engineering.

    View Dilip ‘s profile
  • Anthony Mayer
    VP Engineering & Productcharles

    Anthony is the VP Engineering at charles, focused on expanding conversational commerce on top of WhatsApp across Europe. He was previously at Getsafe, working on modernizing the consumer insurance experience in Europe. Having grown up between the US and Germany and after having worked for US based tech companies like NextRoll and Yelp, he’s excited to now be a part of the German and broader European tech scene.

    When he’s not working on being the best engineering leader he can be and helping his team to grow, Anthony spends his time obsessing over his 2 dogs, 1 cat, and rotating cast of foster cats.

    View Anthony’s profile
12:35

Meet-up panel

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Building the LeadDev community: A meet-ups AMA

Discover how to engage with the global LeadDev engineering leadership community.

+ More

Meet-up panel

Building the LeadDev community: A meet-ups AMA

12:35 – 13:05

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Curious about how LeadDev meet-ups run around the world, or thinking about starting one where you live?

Join current LeadDev meetup organisers for a live AMA on how the meetup programme works, what it’s really like to run a local community, and how you can get involved.

Whether you’re interested in launching a meet-up, speaking, sponsoring, or supporting local organisers, this session will show you how the LeadDev community comes to life, and how you can be part of it.

Find out how you can get involved:

  • Become an organizing host
  • Deliver a talk
  • Sponsor a venue
  • Volunteer to support
  • FEATURING
    Becki Wordsworth
    CTOMeela

    Becki Wordsworth is a Software Developer and Engineering Leader who is passionate about building high-performing teams and helping engineers grow. With experience leading teams through periods of rapid technical change, she focuses on mentoring, capability-building, and creating environments where people can do their best work. Becki is particularly interested in how AI is reshaping software development, engineering culture, and the way developers learn – helping leaders adapt without losing sight of deep technical understanding and long-term growth.

    View Becki’s profile
  • Kate Gridina
    Engineering ManagerResoucify

    Kateryna is an Engineering Manager at eBay in Berlin with over 14 years in engineering and more than 5 years in leadership. She started as a mobile engineer and gradually shifted my focus to DevOps and SRE. The LeadDev community has been instrumental in helping her grow in her career, and she is grateful for the insights and support it has provided along the way. Outside of work, she enjoys skiing, practicing yoga, and foraging for mushrooms.

    View Kate ‘s profile
  • Rui Posse
    Engineering ManagerHosting.com

    Engineering Manager and Full-Stack engineer with 10+ years’ experience leading remote teams, Rui specialises in JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue.js and Node.js. Passionate about mentoring and team culture, he focuses on clear direction, modern engineering practices and pragmatic delivery that balances business impact with technical quality. He is passionate about tech communities and actively engages in sharing knowledge and supporting other engineers.

    View Rui’s profile
  • Ferit Topcu
    Senior Manager, Engineering ManagementZenjob SE

    Ferit Topcu is a Berlin-based Engineering Manager at Zenjob SE, where he leads the Mobile & Marketing Platform Team. With over a decade of software engineering expertise, he’s passionate about exploring AI’s intersection with current engineering roles, its impact on the future of work and React Native. Known for his humor, often derived from his adventures raising three kids, Ferit brings authenticity and humanity to technical leadership. As an active community contributor, he is co-host of the LeadDev Meetup in Berlin.

    View Ferit’s profile
  • Ishaan Singh
    Content and Community Manager

    Ishaan works closely with our audience to curate content for software engineering leaders to address their pain points and help them become more effective in their roles. Ishaan explores new topical themes for future content and exciting new formats for its delivery to drive engagement across our platform.

    She’s recently started leading on the global rollout of LeadDev meetups and other community initiatives.

    View Ishaan’s profile
13:45

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to give any responder instant incident context with incident.io

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to give any responder instant incident context with incident.io

13:45 – 13:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Resolving an incident often depends on reaching the right person at the right time. We’ll show how AI can learn from your code, telemetry, docs and past incidents, then investigate a live alert and give any responder the context they’d normally have to track down.

  • FEATURING
    Alex Turley-Pound
    Senior Solutions EngineerIncident

    Alex is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Incident.io, working with large enterprises to assess and augment their incident response flows with the introduction of AI and automation.

    View Alex’s profile
13:45

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to stay in control in the AI Software Factory with LaunchDarkly

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to stay in control in the AI Software Factory with LaunchDarkly

13:45 – 13:55

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

LaunchDarkly LeadDev

Engineering organisations can now assemble agent-powered systems that write code, review pull requests, validate releases, and deploy changes around the clock, without human hands on every step. Learn how to stay in control while agents do the heavy lifting and walk away understanding the roles of agents, humans, and automation.
14:00

Peer Hangouts

Tech Lead Hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

+ More

Peer Hangouts

Tech Lead Hangout

14:00 – 14:30

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Sattar Falahati
    Division ManagerSpindox

    Sattar builds engineering organizations, recovers delivery when things get stuck, and grows the leaders who take over from him. With 13+ years in tech, he started hands-on and now leads leaders across 210+ engineers. He stays technical enough to challenge architecture and risk, but focuses on a bigger question: do his people have what they need to execute? His experience spans mobile, backend, and frontend, as well as coaching managers, rebuilding trust, and improving how teams hire and grow. He believes the best leaders build teams that can succeed even when they’re not in the room.

    View Sattar’s profile
  • Leandro Vilas
    Software Engineering Team LeadAppinio

    Lean Vilas is a Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead, and mentor with over a decade of experience helping developers grow into confident, high-impact contributors.

    Known for blending technical expertise with a deep focus on people, he teaches software engineers how to navigate career transitions, especially the leap from individual contributor to engineering manager.
    Through his newsletter “From IC to EM” and conference talks, he shares practical, human-centered leadership insights that resonate with devs who want to lead without losing themselves.

    View Leandro’s profile
  • Mahdi Pourziaei
    Tech LeadFashion Cloud

    Mahdi Pourziaei is a Tech Lead / Staff Engineer at Fashion Cloud, driving platform engineering and leading post-startup architecture.

    View Mahdi ‘s profile
  • Theresa Robinson
    Technical LeadRolls-Royce Deutschland

    Theresa Robinson has a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her academic research was in numerical optimization applied to computational fluid dynamic problems, and robust and surrogate-based optimization algorithms. She was an assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Queen’s University Belfast from 2008 to 2012.

    In 2012 she joined Rolls-Royce Deutschland, where she has worked on robust optimization of aircraft engine exhaust systems, safety and reliability analysis and simulation, and python development of internal tools. Currently she is the technical lead for Engine Network, a tool to help Rolls-Royce analyse, visualize, forecast the behaviour of in-service aircraft engines.

    View Theresa’s profile
14:00

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to deploy open-source AI models with Runpod Serverless

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to deploy open-source AI models with Runpod Serverless

14:00 – 14:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Runpod LeadDev

Learn how to deploy open-source AI models like Qwen Vision as serverless GPU endpoints on Runpod. This demo will show how to deploy a model and interact with it using Open WebUI from your local development environment.
14:00

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

How to quickly and easily deploy applications with guardrails with Octopus Deploy

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

+ More

Demos

How to quickly and easily deploy applications with guardrails with Octopus Deploy

14:00 – 14:10

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Octopus Deploy LeadDev

Learn how Octopus Deploy enables any team to quickly and safely create templated pipelines that adhere to organizational standards, while enabling compliance at scale.
14:15

Demos

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Staff+•Tech Lead

Demo by Teleport

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

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Demos

Demo by Teleport

14:15 – 14:25

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Staff+ Tech Lead

Sponsored by

Teleport

Explore solutions for your technical issues.

Make the most of your breaks with the demo stage sessions, where leading tech providers will showcase their innovative solutions in informative and concise presentations. Each carefully curated 10 minute demo will show the very best engineering solutions available.
14:15

Solution Talk

Director+•Experienced Manager•New Manager•Tech Lead

How to grow junior engineers in an AI world

Sponsor-led talks highlighting tools and solutions for real-world engineering problems.

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Solution Talk

How to grow junior engineers in an AI world

14:15 – 14:30

This session is suitable for:

Director+ Experienced Manager New Manager Tech Lead

In partnership with:

CodeYourFuture LeadDev

Juniors used to learn by writing code and hitting problems. Easier problems early on, harder problems as they advance. These days, AI can often do the easy stuff – but struggling with that easy stuff was a fertile learning ground. How do we make sure junior engineers are still learning so that when they hit hard problems they don’t hit a wall? Writing code may continue to be important, or may become less important, but judgement, design, anticipating what can go wrong and how to avoid it will be more important than ever. Effective senior engineers using AI lean heavily on this experience, but how will the next generation learn them?

We’ll discuss how we train early-career talent at CodeYourFuture, how we’re adapting to a world of AI, and how to think about continuing junior growth on your teams. Bring your problems, bring your questions, bring your fears: we can explore them together.
14:45

Peer Hangouts

Principal Engineer Hangout

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

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Peer Hangouts

Principal Engineer Hangout

14:45 – 15:15

Hang out with other leaders in similar roles.

Comparing notes on shared challenges that come with your role has never been easier. Peer Hangouts are 30-minute, casual networking sessions for folks to talk through their experiences and challenges with peers who understand the context they’re working in. Drop in and join a conversation!

  • FEATURING
    Justin Abrahms
    Principal EngineerParloa

    Justin Abrahms is a Principal Engineer at Parloa.

    View Justin’s profile
  • Bartosz Ocytko
    Executive Principal EngineerZalando

    Bartosz is an Executive Principal Engineer at Zalando’s eCommerce Platform, where he is responsible for group-wide B2C business and Developer Platforms that serve over 50m customers. Bartosz leads and contributes to strategic and group-wide engineering initiatives for platform capabilities, customer-facing products, and more recently focused on engineering productivity, GenAI, and Machine Learning. In the past 8+ years, he has role modeled the senior individual contributor track at Zalando, mentored engineers throughout their senior IC growth journeys, and helped set up Zalando’s Principal Engineering Community.

    View Bartosz’s profile
  • Laura Ureche
    Principal EngineerSeven.One Entertainment Group

    Laura Ureche is a Principal Engineer with over 13 years of experience across startups and large organizations. She has a background in testing, software development, and SRE, and is known for driving scalable solutions, improving system reliability, and mentoring engineering teams. Passionate about problem-solving and observability, she helps teams deliver high-quality, impactful software.

    View Laura’s profile
  • Shadi Sharaf
    Principal EngineerClave

    Principal Engineer with 20+ years of experience architecting distributed systems at scale, within the publishing, media, banking, and education industries. Open source contributor, Linux Foundation project committee member, tech speaker, student mentor, and local meetup organizer. Deep expertise in enterprise high-traffic scalable distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, large-scale migrations, supply chain security, performance optimization, and Agentic AI integrations.

    Proven track record of leading cross-functional high-performing teams, implementing agile practices, growth-oriented initiatives, and experimentation cultures.

    View Shadi ‘s profile
  • Laís Oliveira
    Principal EngineerNubank

    Born and raised in Brazil, based in Berlin, Laís Oliveira is a marathonist, outdoor sports enthusiast and a Principal Engineer at Nubank. She holds a bachelor in Computer Science and a MBA in Software Engineering both graduated in São Paulo. Over the years she has built large scale systems for retail and financial industries, including building Nubank since early days from 12 thousand to 70 million customers. As a technical leader her areas of interest are functional programming, software architecture and cloud Infrastructure.

    View Laís’s profile
14:45

Next Steps AMA

Becoming a VP of Engineering

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for Becoming a VP of Engineering.

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Next Steps AMA

Becoming a VP of Engineering

14:45 – 15:15

Dedicated sessions on how to take the next step in your career for Becoming a VP of Engineering.

  • FEATURING
    Stephen Strike
    SVP of EngineeringInterplay Learning

    Stephen StrikeStephen Strike is an SVP of Engineering at Interplay Learning.

    View Stephen’s profile
  • Dilip Saha
    VP of Engineering

    Dilip Saha is a VP of Engineering.

    View Dilip ‘s profile
  • Anthony Mayer
    VP Engineering & Productcharles

    Anthony is the VP Engineering at charles, focused on expanding conversational commerce on top of WhatsApp across Europe. He was previously at Getsafe, working on modernizing the consumer insurance experience in Europe. Having grown up between the US and Germany and after having worked for US based tech companies like NextRoll and Yelp, he’s excited to now be a part of the German and broader European tech scene.

    When he’s not working on being the best engineering leader he can be and helping his team to grow, Anthony spends his time obsessing over his 2 dogs, 1 cat, and rotating cast of foster cats.

    View Anthony’s profile