Event for hands-on Engineering Leaders Amsterdam Edition: Adopting AI in Orgs

Lindsey Simon is the VP of Engineering at Vercel. Making the Web faster has been his lifelong career ambition. Prior to Vercel, Lindsey spent seven years at Google, where he helped launch App Engine as an original core team member, and worked as a tech lead on the Google Translate and Web Performance teams. Lindsey has lived in San Francisco for the past 15 years, and his creative hobbies (beyond coding) include writing music and hunting for wild mushrooms.

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.

Ilya Pukhalski is a founder and partner at ENDGAME. He spent 20+ years in software engineering, architecture and product development, designing and delivering large transformation programs for IKEA, Primark, Nike, Albert Heijn. He founded ENDGAME on a conviction: software engineering is in a renaissance, and machines amplify great engineering minds rather than replace them. At ENDGAME he builds a dark factory of autonomous agent pipelines, and helps other organizations make the same leap into agentic product development.

Founder of Theodo, a tech consultancy he scaled with Benoît Charles-Lavauzelle from 10 to 700 people in 10 years. He worked on his first large legacy modernisation in 2008 and has been back in the trenches to experiment first-hand how AI is revolutionising this challenge. Fabrice has shared his Lean Tech and AI modernisation expertise at various conferences, including CraftConf, DevopsDays and Lean Summits.

Richard is a Senior Software Engineer at Sentry on the Issues team, where his recent projects include redesigning the Issues UI and creating LLM-based Issue Detection. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, skiing, and being disappointed in the Ferrari F1 team.

Ben Brandt works at Zed, helping shape how engineers collaborate with AI and with each other. He is also a Lead Maintainer of the Agent Client Protocol, an open standard for interoperability between editors and coding agents.

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.

Daniel Frey is a Tech Lead and AI Architect specialized in building autonomous agent systems that bridge the gap between LLMs and real-world execution. As the founder of FiveTimesFaster, Daniel is a pioneer in the "Agentic OS" movement, leveraging frameworks like OpenClaw and LangGraph to build AI teams that autonomously manage complex engineering and sales workflows. Currently leading high-impact initiatives at Nationale-Nederlanden, Daniel combines 9+ years of full-stack expertise with a focus on agentic orchestration. He is a recognized voice in the AI community, exploring the future of human-AI collaboration through his podcast and hands-on implementation of self-improving agent loops that have already driven 40% performance gains in production environments.

Tech Lead • Front-End Advocate • Mentor & Educator • Tech Blogger • Published Author • 100+ IT Certifications • 30K+ Followers • Docker Captain • Cursor Ambassador • Expert in React.js, Next.js, Angular, DevOps, Web Accessibility & Security Kristiyan Velkov is a seasoned software developer and technical leader with more than 10 + years of expertise in JavaScript and open-source development. His comprehensive skill set includes: JavaScript, TypeScript, React.js, Angular, Vue.js, Next.js,DevOps,Web accessibility,Security and DevOps. A lifelong learner, Kristiyan has earned over 100 IT certifications. With experience at some of the world’s leading IT organizations, Kristiyan thrives as a technical lead, driving innovative projects and mentoring teams to achieve growth and excellence. His thought leadership has garnered a significant following: - 30,000 LinkedIn connections - 7,000 Medium subscribers - 100,000+ monthly readers - 4 IT books.

Jessica has extensive experience and expertise within cloud architecture, cloud infrastructure and platform engineering. She is a hands on, technical architect and team lead who has built up and led platform teams within developer experience and data. She is also a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ambassador who regularly shares her knowledge both in the local Gothenburg community and at conferences such as QCon.​

Matija is currently a Director of Engineering at Workera, an AI-powered skills intelligence platform for enterprise workflows. At Workera, he leads teams that create assessments based on enterprise knowledge bases and evaluate employees' skills to guide further upskilling. Over the past 12 years, he has held various leadership roles in product and engineering across the financial, semiconductor, and education technology sectors. The main tech questions he enjoys solving are: “How can we get people to play to each other’s strengths?” and “How can we encode architecture so it doesn’t live only in a document or in people’s minds?” After work, his time is delightfully filled with being a parent to two young children, biking, swimming, following F1, and playing his current favorite game: GeoGuessr.

Mo is an Associate Partner at Theodo, who focuses on AI tooling and AI-accelerated modernisation. He has worked with large enterprises to help them adopt AI at scale across engineering teams.

Santosh is a Principal Developer Advocate at CodeRabbit, a GDE for Angular, GitHub Star, Nx Champion and Microsoft MVP. He loves contributing to Angular and its ecosystem and loves monorepos.

HT Sahin leads engineering teams that power global retail and logistics and still finds time to obsess over hands-on engineering problems, product design, and experiments.

I am an Engineering Manager in Fintech at Booking.com, where I lead a high-performing team responsible for payment processing for accommodation partners. My team supports payment operations at a massive scale, serving more than 10 million partners and processing billions of euros every month. Additionally, I am the horizontal owner for Accelerate AI in Fintech, overseeing more than 50+ AI initiatives across the fintech organization. My key objectives include scaling AI efforts across five departments and 1,000+ employees, as well as developing enablement strategies for upskilling teams through an AI Ambassador group. I also mentor senior leadership at Booking.com including VPs, SVPs, senior directors, and directors. and involved in the Super 40 GenAI Trainer program to train Booking Engineers staff on generative AI.

Julia Wallin is a passionate Software Engineering Manager focused on building and scaling high-performing engineering teams that both build and use AI to build. With more than a decade of industry experience, she leads cross-functional teams to deliver reliable, production-grade platforms and large-scale products and services. A sought-after speaker, Julia presents on the intersection of AI and software engineering, sharing practical strategies for team structure, developer productivity, and engineering culture. Her clear, energetic delivery leaves audiences with actionable insights for improving technical processes, scaling teams, and accelerating delivery.

Sergio Mendonça is an engineering leader and former CTO with a strong background in hands-on architecture and distributed systems. He is currently an Engineering Manager at Delivery Hero (Pandora) in Berlin, where he leads teams working on mission-critical order and settlement systems. Previously, he co-founded and served as CTO of Mettzer, an edtech platform, where he led product scaling, payments/subscriptions, and engineering operations.

Engineering leader with 10+ years of experience in software development, testing infrastructure, and team leadership. Passionate about delivering high-quality products, empowering teams, and fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous growth. Skilled in engineering management, project execution, and aligning technical excellence with business goals.

Jonida Mersinllari is a Technical Lead at Consentmo, with over 11 years of experience in software engineering, leading the development of privacy and consent management solutions used globally. She specializes in translating complex regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA, and TCF into scalable, high-performance systems. With a strong background in software architecture and engineering leadership, she has extensive experience building and scaling teams, defining technical strategy, and delivering production-ready solutions in fast-paced environments. Jonida is particularly interested in how AI is reshaping software development, from engineering workflows to hiring and team dynamics, and brings hands-on experience in applying these changes within real-world teams.

Viktor Didenchuk is a Lead Technical Program Manager at JPMorganChase in London, where he leads delivery of a cloud-first core banking platform for Chase UK. After starting his career as a software engineer, Viktor progressively expanded into delivery and product ownership, founding and growing an engineering consultancy to 20 employees before joining enterprise banking. He is skilled at translating complex technical challenges into strategic business outcomes. Viktor has an MBA from one of the top business schools and is a big advocate of continuous learning.

Nihan Bircan is a Senior Engineering Manager at Flo Health in London, leading a team of iOS, Android, and backend engineers building AI-driven health and wellbeing features for one of the world's leading women's health apps. Her work includes cross-company integrations with Oura, Google Health Connect, and Apple HealthKit to improve ML-based cycle predictions. With 15 years in software development and 8 years in leadership, Nihan has held roles at Spotify, Microsoft, and Schibsted. At Flo, she launched initiatives recovering significant lost revenue, drove gamification features that meaningfully lifted premium activation and retention, and delivered the company's first marketable perimenopause product achieving multi-million dollar revenue targets.

Denis Ermakov is a software engineer with 15+ years of experience building developer tools and scalable systems. He currently works as a Lead Software Engineer at Tehpotok, where he designs architecture, CI/CD pipelines, and automation for fintech products. Denis previously worked on search infrastructure at ANNA Money and led multiple engineering teams as a CTO and delivery manager. His interests focus on AI-powered developer workflows, CI/CD automation, and improving software delivery systems.

Andrew is a veteran software leader with two decades of experience across diverse industries, including finance and eCommerce. During his four years as a Principal Software Engineer at Miro, he has driven both infrastructure and product initiatives. He currently leads AI adoption for engineering, product, and design from within the Developer Experience stream. His background also includes three years at Skyscanner, where he helped architect a robust machine learning and personalization platform. Andrew lives with his family in the UK and tries his best not to think about imposter syndrome.

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.

Asparuh Hristov, AI Craft Lead and Engineering Manager, having a life-long passion for optimization, learning, and content-to-word ratio minimizer.

With 15+ years spanning distributed systems, real-time data infrastructure, and high-performance UIs across Google, Microsoft, Spotify, and Booking.com, Valerii is passionate about developer experience, low-latency systems, and bridging the gap between complex backend architectures and intuitive user-facing products.

Syed Kadar Ansari is an Engineering Manager leading Growth Marketing Technology engineering, working at the intersection of engineering, data, product, and business teams. He focuses on scaling practical AI adoption across engineering workflows, helping teams improve delivery, collaboration, and decision-making in the AI era. Syed is also the author of a book on Amazon Bedrock and generative AI applications, where he explores how teams can build, integrate, and scale AI-powered solutions in real-world environments.

Shifra Williams is a Developer Relations Engineer at Render, where her work spans technical education, community building, and a growing bet: making cloud infrastructure legible to AI agents, not just humans. Her background in data science, technical writing, and developer advocacy lets her meet both technical and early-career audiences where they are. What drives Shifra most is closing the gap between technical experts and the people trying to learn from them, and building the bridges that make that knowledge transfer actually work.