TechLead Conf London 2026: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition

Award-winning engineering leader, TEDx speaker, and author of Amazon bestselling career guide "You Belong in Tech". She started coding at 8 and has since led teams across consulting, health tech, AI innovation, and media. In 2024, she won Software Engineering Leader of the Year with the WomenTech Global Awards; and in 2025, her technical interview structure, "The McDougall Method" was revealed in a blog post which shot to prominence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've been the engineering manager and I've been the product manager. That's what lets me say what we're building, why, and if it's worth doing. News, streaming, energy trading, virtual reality, logistics, in organisations from a startup to one with over 20,000 people. I once worked around the technical limits of Apple News to get a newsroom into its launch. I've also taken progress and risk to the CPO and CTO.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.