Ilya Pukhalski

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.

ENDGAME, The Netherlandspukhalski

Building Blocks of an Agentic Engineering Platform: What SRE Taught Us About Running Agents

TechLead Conf Amsterdam 2026: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition

Upcoming

Building Blocks of an Agentic Engineering Platform: What SRE Taught Us About Running Agents

Agents are the next distributed system: non-deterministic, autonomous, and tool-connected. Some patterns we rely on to run distributed systems reliably transfer directly; others break down and need rethinking.

This talk applies lessons from DevOps, platform engineering, and SRE to the agent era: enablement structures, hybrid pipelines mixing deterministic and probabilistic steps, SLOs and error budgets for agent reliability, context engineering as the new dependency management, golden paths for non-deterministic actors, and where human judgment belongs in agent pipelines.

Building blocks, patterns, tactics, and hard learnings from running agents in production on enterprise client engagements.

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