AI Builders Summit 2026

Tom Achebe

CTO, Forgeline

Tom co-founded Forgeline after leading platform engineering at two payments companies. He is the reason Forgeline had an evaluation suite before it had a marketing site.

2 sessions

Nina Berg

Staff SRE, Halberd

Nina is on call for a platform that serves inference in forty countries. She thinks most reliability work is really vocabulary work: naming failure modes precisely enough to fix them.

1 session

Marco Bianchi

Site Reliability Engineer, Palazzo

Marco keeps Palazzo's event infrastructure standing through traffic spikes measured in orders of magnitude. He has run the network for three conferences and lived to describe it.

1 session

Felix Braun

Infrastructure Lead, Morgenrot

Felix keeps Morgenrot's GPU fleet busy and its finance team calm. He wrote two internal post-mortems that are now required onboarding reading.

1 session

Amara Diallo

Security Researcher, Halcyon Labs

Amara leads red-team work on agent systems at Halcyon. Her disclosure of the tool-confusion class of prompt injections is why several vendors now scope tool permissions per call.

1 session

Leila Farsi

Staff Product Manager, Coastline

Leila owns the trust and safety surface for Coastline's assistant. She used to be a reporter, which shows in the way she writes specifications.

2 sessions

Omar Haddad

Distinguished Engineer, Qanat Systems

Omar has spent twenty years on data infrastructure, most recently the query layer behind Qanat's edge platform. He is unreasonably interested in what happens at p99.9.

2 sessions

Zoe Kimura

Engineering Manager, Fernbrook

Zoe leads the platform team at Fernbrook and spent the past year replacing internal tools with fewer, better ones. She keeps a public list of everything she deleted.

1 session

Dana Kowalski

Principal Engineer, Substrate AI

Dana runs the code-generation platform at Substrate, where about a third of merged pull requests are now machine-authored. Her work is mostly the verification layer that makes that survivable.

2 sessions

Sofia Lindqvist

Engineering Manager, Norrsken Data

Sofia manages the developer-experience group at Norrsken, a team she started by asking every engineer which internal tool they would delete first. She has been an SRE, a compiler engineer and, briefly, a professional oboist.

1 session

Grace Liu

AI Product Lead, Meridian

Grace has shipped AI features to twelve million users and killed about as many that never earned their place. She writes about interface design for systems that answer differently every time.

2 sessions

Andre Lucas

Head of AI, Bellweather

Andre runs a ten-person AI group inside a four-thousand-person company and spends half his time on procurement. He is honest about which of those two is harder.

1 session

Kwame Mensah

Director of Engineering, Northwind Health

Kwame leads the clinical AI group at Northwind, where every model output is reviewed by a clinician before it reaches a chart. He is candid about what regulation does and does not actually slow down.

2 sessions

Ines Moreau

Design Lead, Calyx

Ines designed Calyx's assistant interface and then its undo system, in that order of difficulty. She is a recovering print designer who still sets type by hand for fun.

2 sessions

Clara Novak

Head of Developer Relations, Ambit

Clara grew Ambit's developer community from a chat server with nine people in it. She has run more than forty workshops and has firm opinions about the ones that do not work.

1 session

Marcus Okafor

Staff Developer Advocate, Cloudreach Labs

Marcus spent six years on build infrastructure before moving into advocacy, and still maintains the caching tool that came out of it. Most of his talks open with a CI pipeline somebody let rot for two years.

1 session

Ben Oyelaran

Principal Architect, Steelhead

Ben designs integration platforms for companies with more legacy systems than engineers. He believes most AI adoption problems are really data-contract problems wearing a new hat.

2 sessions

Raj Patel

Founding Engineer, Tandem Agents

Raj was employee number two at Tandem and wrote the streaming layer the product is now known for. He has rewritten it three times and expects a fourth.

1 session

Ivan Petrov

Compiler Engineer, Northgate

Ivan works on the toolchain that compiles Northgate's models down to edge targets. He is happiest when a benchmark gets slower and he gets to find out why.

1 session

Aisha Rahman

VP Engineering, Loomis

Aisha grew Loomis engineering from twelve people to ninety while shipping the company's first AI product. She writes mostly about the parts of that which went badly.

2 sessions

Priya Raman

Priya Raman is a Principal Engineer at Latticework Systems where she leads the build-tooling platform team. She previously maintained the open-source task runner 'gantry' and has spoken at over a dozen developer conferences on build systems, CI reliability, and developer productivity metrics.

1 session

Priya Raman

Staff Engineer, Latticework Systems

Priya leads the agent platform team at Latticework, where she rebuilt the company's retrieval stack around explicit context budgets after a rewrite that took two attempts. She writes the Context Notes newsletter and has been shipping LLM products since the first public API keys.

1 session

Diego Ramirez

Data Platform Engineer, Verdant

Diego moved Verdant's analytics stack off a warehouse it had outgrown and wrote down every wrong turn on the way. He mentors at two Bay Area programs.

2 sessions

Hana Sato

Research Engineer, Aperture AI

Hana works on small-model distillation and spends most of her week reading evaluation traces. She was a computational linguist before that and it shows in her error taxonomies.

2 sessions

Yuki Tanaka

Head of Platform, Kitsune Cloud

Yuki built Kitsune's multi-region control plane and now leads the team that keeps it boring. Before that: eight years of distributed databases and one very educational New Year's Eve outage.

1 session

Elena Vasquez

ML Engineer, Braid Research

Elena works on retrieval and evaluation at Braid. She published an open benchmark suite after getting tired of numbers that never reproduced on her own hardware.

2 sessions

Theo Whitfield

Staff Engineer, Junction

Theo works on Junction's orchestration engine and the scheduler underneath it. He came to distributed systems from computational biology and has never entirely left.

1 session