Kseniia Korostelova

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.

Aristocrat Interactive, UKsubstack.com/@ohmindthegap kseniia-korostelova

Interests:

code quality team productivity scalability design systems best practices aws future of development architecture soft skills developer experience ci cd

Trust Engineering: Replacing Hope with Reliability

TechLead Conf London 2026: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition

Upcoming

Trust Engineering: Replacing Hope with Reliability

How do you deliver with AI and still sleep at night? By engineering trust into your delivery system.
In this talk, I'll share an end-to-end AI engineering workflow we built and ran on a production codebase, redefining roles, responsibilities, quality gates, and human decision points across the entire delivery lifecycle.
You'll leave with a practical framework for engineering AI workflows where reliability is designed in, trust is earned, and success becomes the default outcome, not a fortunate accident.

artificial intelligence

Organic Leadership in the Age of AI: Why human Touch Becomes More Valuable Than Ever

TechLead Conf Amsterdam 2026: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition

8 min

Organic Leadership in the Age of AI: Why human Touch Becomes More Valuable Than Ever

In this talk, Kseniia Korostelova shares the results of a real experiment where she attempted to delegate parts of her engineering leadership work to AI. From architecture decisions and feature planning to design reviews and performance feedback, some tasks worked surprisingly well while others failed completely.
These experiences led to the concept of Organic Leadership: a leadership approach that uses AI to remove noise while preserving the human judgment, trust, and context that teams rely on.
You will learn where AI can genuinely augment engineering leadership today, where it cannot, and why the rise of AI may actually increase the value of truly human leadership.

case study