Name: TechLead Conf London 2025: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition
Start: 2025-11-28T08:00:00.000Z
End: 2025-11-28T17:00:00.000Z

Ivan Almasi

Antanina Vertsinskaya

FLOR URBINATI

Karina Bunta

Dom Sipowicz

Archana Gupta

Robbie Thandi

Julián Parrilla Calvo

Carlos Parreno

Andrew Murphy

Technical interviews are struggling to keep pace with the reality of modern software engineering in a time of AI agents. LLMs and their offshoots can now easily solve take-home assessments, and traditional DSA formats reward memorisation over real-world skills. So how can we accurately and fairly assess the technical abilities of engineers as part of a standardised hiring process? In late 2024, I began a redesign of the technical interview process at HelloBetter, a mental health tech company in Berlin. The aim was to create a format that actually reflects day-to-day engineering work, while also being time-conscious, inclusive, and accepting of the presence of AI in developer workflows. In the process, we created "The McDougall Method": a new and emerging framework for better interview processes which is quickly forcing technical leaders to rethink their AI mitigation strategies.

Transforming Your Tech Interviews in the AI Agent Age

Anna J McDougall

Technical leaders face the challenge of balancing innovation with governance when rolling out AI assistants across teams. This session offers a tactical view on operationalizing AI in software development - covering success metrics, telemetry, feedback loops, and enterprise guardrails. Based on the GitHub Well-Architected framework and broadened to general-purpose AI tools, we’ll explore how to create visibility into usage, address security and compliance risks, and ensure that AI-powered development doesn’t just happen - it scales with intent and trust. A must-attend for those building the platforms and policies of tomorrow’s engineering organizations.

From Experiment to Enterprise: Scaling AI Coding Assistants Across Engineering Teams

Maxim Salnikov

Gregor will be sharing both positive and negative trends that he's seeing, speaking with many engineering leaders across the industry. He'll also share how the role of engineering leaders is evolving, and tips on what to do to be a successful engineering leader in the age of AI.

How AI is Impacting Engineering Leadership

Gregor Ojstersek

Our world runs on IT built in the 80s and 90s by engineers who are now retiring. This is becoming very worrying for corporates who have critical systems running on legacy code that only a handful of people still understand.That's where GenAI arrives. With its almost magical transpilation abilities, it is the innovation that was needed to kickstart the legacy modernisations that had been postponed for too long.Having worked on critical modernisations for more than 15 years, I jumped on the opportunity to experiment with how LLMs can accelerate complex migration projects. I will share the concrete experience we have accumulated on a wide range of stacks (Swift-&gt;React-Native, Eclipse RCP -&gt; Spring Boot, Java 1.6 Spring -&gt; Java 21 Spring Boot, PHP ZF1 -&gt; Symfony 7), cover both the good surprises and the limitations that we uncovered, and share our current playbook to best leverage AI when migrating a legacy system.

AI-accelerated Legacy Modernisation

Fabrice Bernhard

As artificial intelligence evolves from simple task automation to autonomous agents capable of independent decision-making and task execution, enterprises face new identity and access management (IAM) challenges. In this interactive workshop, participants will explore and apply strategies to secure AI agents as they consume business services on-behalf-of users or own their own.Through hands-on exercises, real-world scenarios, and a guided technical tutorial, you’ll learn how AI agents can:- Be treated as managed, first-class entities within the business systems- Authenticate and obtain authorisation independently or on behalf of users- Leverage and extend standards such as OAuth 2.0 and OpenID ConnectBy the end of the workshop, attendees will have actionable skills and a framework for securing AI agents while preserving their autonomous capabilities, ensuring enterprise adoption without compromising security or compliance.

IAM for Agentic Era: Guide to Build Secure AI Agents

Godwin Amila

This workshop introduces how to use open-source LLMs on-premise for enhanced data control, privacy, and cost efficiency. It highlights Ollama for simplified LLM management (downloading, running models offline) and FastAPI for efficient local hosting, enabling fast API development and seamless integration. This combined approach offers superior security, regulatory compliance, and customization compared to cloud-based solutions.

On-Premise Open-Source LLMs with Ollama & FastAPI

Brendon Co

Agent demos are shiny; daily use is messy. In this talk I’ll share a handful of short, honest stories from shipping agent workflows with real teams—what we tried, how people reacted, what surprised us, and what we changed the next day. Rather than theory, you’ll hear concrete moments (wins, faceplants, near-misses) and the practical learnings that emerged. You’ll leave with clear and battle-tested principles that encompass the new world we are all approaching.

Everyone Is Now a Manager - Interfaces in the World of Agents

Sam Komesarook

As AI transforms software development, teams face a critical choice: lead the change, or risk being left behind! At Typeform, we're proactively encouraging the use of AI tools, and helping everyone level-up their AI proficiency.This means lots of things including the flexibility to try different tools, democratising access to (but controlling our expenditure on) LLMs, and ensuring we're hiring the next generation of engineers who have AI as part of their DNA.In this talk, I'll provide some practical examples of how we're achieving these things at Typeform, as well as how we're enhancing the way we collaborate with people outside of engineering using AI tools.I'll share real examples using AWS Bedrock and MCP servers, plus hard-won lessons from our journey. If your team is on the path to AI transformation, this talk will give you some practical strategies for making it a success.

Democratising AI in Engineering: Lessons from Typeform's Journey

Andy Kuszyk

In early 2025, a team of skilled engineers was given a formidable challenge: go from a traditional software engineering skillset to launching a production-grade, agentic AI insurance solution in just 16 weeks. This talk tells the story of that journey. It will dive into the practical, human-centric playbook developed for rapid upskilling in the age of AI. The presenter, Tim Makin, will share how his team built not just an "agentic engine room" on AWS Bedrock and a suite of collaborator agents, but also a culture of intense, continuous learning and psychological safety. Attendees will leave with a replicable framework for transforming their own teams into AI-native powerhouses.

Forging the Agentic Engine Room: A Human-Centric Playbook

Tim Makin

At Capital on Tap, the AI team began outside Engineering, and has had a contentious time integrating the team into our existing Engineering structure - with an unclear mandate, pressure to turn prototypes into production systems. Most organisations have prototypes; far fewer have safe, reliable customer-facing AI products. This talk is a practitioner’s playbook for AI in organisations and measuring AI impact and ROI in a regulated UK fintech context—focused on operating model, gates, product-readiness, and post-launch measurement tied to operational outcomes.

Shipping AI Under Constraints: Build, Buy, or Kill

Dave Glencross

TechLead Conference

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The Conference for Tech Leads, Staff Engineers, and Technical Eng Managers.TechLead Conf 2025 tackles two critical challenges facing technical leaders today: navigating AI adoption in organizations and reducing system complexity. Through real-world case studies from startups to Big Tech, senior engineers and tech leads will share practical insights from the trenches.Engage in discussion rooms, hallway track with experts, hands-on practical workshops, and tens of insightful talks.