Adopting AI as hands-on Engineering Leaders Practical AI in SDLC from discovery to production

Gregor is an engineering leader with 12+ years of experience in the engineering industry. In his career, he grew as an engineer to Senior Software Engineer and after to Lead roles (Team Lead to Engineering Manager to Head of Engineering to VP of Engineering to CTO). And now he is helping people and teams/companies to thrive with Fractional/Interim CTO roles, tech advising, coaching and mentoring. He is also writing one of the fastest growing newsletters for engineers and managers called Engineering Leadership newsletter.

Sajal is a Staff Software Engineer at Meta in London and a former Engineering Manager. He has experience in end-to-end product development, technical leadership, and leading engineering teams through complex and ambiguous product development cycles. His work focuses on building customer-focused products and scalable software systems, developing clear technical strategies, and helping teams evolve their engineering practices. He has also led the transition of engineering teams from traditional software development approaches toward AI-driven development.

Dünya Kırkalı is an engineering leader and software engineer whose journey spans building mobile apps, web services, data pipelines, and visualizations across diverse industries and teams. This breadth of experience shaped him into a true generalist, an asset when leading engineers from different disciplines. It also set him on the path to the field he fell in love with: engineering management. Left to his own devices, Dünya enjoys putting on a Joe Pass record and reflecting on ways to create tools and techniques to help engineering managers discover their own global maxima.

Scott Roe-Meschke is an Engineering Manager at Cloudflare focused on Developer Productivity and Agentic Engineering.

He has spent much of his career improving how engineers build and ship software, with prior engineering leadership roles at Snap, Twitter, Stash, and Blinker.

Daria Stroganova is an Engineering Manager at Meta in London, with nearly two decades of experience in software engineering and engineering leadership. She has led engineering teams through periods of growth, complex product development, and evolving technical and organisational challenges.

More recently, her work has focused on applying recent advances in AI and agentic approaches to ensuring the accessibility of Meta products. She is particularly interested in how AI is reshaping established roles in technology, coaching people as they navigate new career paths, and finding the right balance between the speed AI enables and the quality engineering organisations need to maintain.

Yusuf Tayman is a Lead QA Engineer at Insider One with eight years of experience in test automation and QA architecture. He specializes in building AI-driven systems that augment and automate manual testing processes, serving as the automation mentor across engineering teams. Yusuf is passionate about leveraging AI agents to eliminate repetitive testing bottlenecks, reduce human error, and give teams real-time visibility into application quality.

Tech Lead with over 15 years of experience in IT across various industries, including media, public sector or finance. Proven track record in leading development teams, designing scalable systems, and delivering impactful solutions. Recent work focuses on the practical implementation of AI in production environments, enhancing workflows, automating processes, and driving innovation.

15 years in technology with last 5 leading orgs across Meta Ads, Instagram and Meta Integrity enabling AI-Native future.

Dr. Fabio Dias is the Programme Director of the FinTech and Policy MSc at the University of Surrey and a researcher for the SAEF Centre. A multidisciplinary academic with a background in computer science and statistics, he holds a PhD in Econometrics from University College London (UCL). Before his current academic tenure, Dr. Dias acquired extensive industry experience, holding senior roles in technology and risk management at major financial institutions, including Credit Suisse and Lloyds Banking Group. His research interests lie at the intersection of finance and technology, specifically focusing on financial modelling, artificial intelligence applications in finance, and quantitative risk management.

Kanika Arora is a Software Development Manager at Amazon in London, where she leads an engineering team building the Retail Catalog Pipeline—the systems behind the product detail page for every item on Amazon. Over the past year, her team has integrated AI into their everyday engineering practices, building and shipping internal tooling that has since been adopted by a dozen other engineering teams across the organization. Before Amazon, Kanika worked at Meta on Instagram Shopping and Reels, and spent several years as a Computer Scientist at Adobe, where she built ML-powered features for Acrobat. She studied Computer Science at the University of Southern California. Outside of work, Kanika hosts Work, Life & Zen, a podcast exploring how to build calmer, more intentional careers. She is passionate about the intersection of technology, engineering leadership, and wellbeing—and about helping people do exceptional work without burning out.

10+ years of experience in applying AI to business problems, most recently serving as CCO and COO at startups that announced ~$75m in Seed and Series A funding during tenure, inclusive of a publicly disclosed $100m post-money Series A valuation. Led AI transformation initiatives and model deployment at Palantir Technologies and QuantumBlack (McKinsey's AI unit) for some of the world's largest companies in sectors such as financial services and manufacturing. Angel Investor and Board Member at early stage startups. Patent holder, MA & BA in International Economics, and Fulbright Fellow in Japan.

Eugene Sergueev is a Director of Engineering at Flo Health, where he leads cross-functional teams building large-scale consumer product experiences across content, search, personalization, moderation, and social features.

He works at the intersection of product engineering, team effectiveness, and practical AI adoption. His current focus is making AI-powered development workflows measurable, reliable, governed, and production-ready — especially in environments where quality, privacy, and operational risk matter.

Drishti is an Engineering Leader at Meta in the UK, with experience spanning both technical and people leadership across Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. She has held roles as both a Staff Engineer and an Engineering Manager, giving her a broad perspective on engineering leadership, technical excellence, and building high-performing teams.

Passionate about people growth and development, Drishti is an active mentor both within and beyond her organisations. She is particularly interested in helping engineers grow their careers, develop as leaders, and navigate the transition between technical and people leadership, especially in the new AI world.

Rahul Kumar is an Engineering Leader at loveholidays in London, originally from New Zealand. He has worked across travel, real estate, and healthcare, and is passionate about building high-performing teams through autonomy, trust, and continuous growth. He combines hands-on technical experience with a focus on delivering simple solutions that create meaningful business value.

I've been the engineering manager and I've been the product manager.

My work has taken me across news, streaming, energy trading, virtual reality, logistics - and organisations from startups to companies with over 20,000 people. I once worked around the technical limits of Apple News to get a newsroom to its launch. When I took over a failing team of nineteen, nobody left in the following year.

Right now I'm focused on AI adoption in engineering teams - and on whether the advantage still comes from the tools, or from the people.

Daniil is a Senior Engineering Leader, currently leading engineering teams building the systems that train and deploy AI for the physical world. He previously operated distributed backend systems at hyperscale at Meta and led payments infrastructure at Teya, a UK fintech unicorn. An established speaker at industry events and conferences across Europe, he works at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, ML infrastructure, and engineering leadership.

Bogdana is an Engineering Manager at Zoopla, where she leads teams in building scalable, high-impact technology solutions. Over the past nine years, she has grown from an eager engineering intern into a thoughtful leader passionate about people, process, and continuous improvement.

Her career spans both fast-paced startups and large organizations, giving her a broad perspective on how teams thrive in different environments. Beyond her day-to-day work, Bogdana is dedicated to supporting the next generation of technologists. She has taught at coding bootcamps and apprenticeships, guided students in launching their careers, and was an instructor for Code First Girls.

Driven by curiosity and a focus on growth, Bogdana helps engineers find opportunities for learning and innovation in the fast-moving world of tech.

My name is Carlos Fuentes and I am a Software Engineer with experience in designing cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and IAM. Actively open-source contributor and maintainer of Fastify, Undici and Piscina, and currently employed at Auth0/Okta as a Senior Software Engineer.

Freddie Tibbles has spent two decades building web platforms at scale, from FTP go-lives to agentic deployment. A second-time founder (Techstars 2017), he has led award-winning teams across digital marketing, music tech, live sports betting and most recently e-commerce at Tesco, where he pioneered AI-native design systems. His "Design System as a Service" methodology serves 250+ teams across the retailer's digital estate. He has grown engineering teams from 1 to 100+.

AI has made creating code cheap. Owning it costs what it always did. Freddie founded Modomics to measure that carrying cost, module by module, in the unit engineering actually spends: hours. The system closes the loop by directing agentic workflows scoped to the toil of keeping code alive, returning capacity to the roadmap.

Kseniia Korostelova is a senior engineering leader with over 10 years of experience building complex software systems and leading engineering teams through high-stakes product launches. She has managed engineering organisations of up to 50 engineers and specialises in scaling teams and systems in demanding technical environments.

Her work focuses on how AI is reshaping engineering leadership. Through her writing and talks, she explores the concept of Organic Leadership: using AI to remove operational noise while preserving the human judgment, trust, and mentorship that teams depend on.

Kseniia writes about leadership and technology in her Substack, "Oh Mind the Gap". Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, being near the sea, and occasionally growing tomatoes, which inspired the metaphor behind Organic Leadership.

Engineering Manager at Zapp with 17+ years of experience building large-scale platforms and leading multi-million dollar projects. Co-founder of multiple startups, open-source contributor, and UK Global Talent Visa holder. Named World’s Most Influential Mentor and #1 Mentor in Europe by ADPList. Former WorldSkills medalist.