Austin Databricks Meetup: Governance with Unity Catalog & AI Agents in Action

Austin Databricks Meetup: Governance with Unity Catalog & AI Agents in Action

Join the Austin Data & AI community for an evening of hands-on learning, real-world demos, and networking. This meetup will cover two hot topics on the Databricks Lakehouse:

Unity Catalog Governance (Aldis Stareczek, Solutions Engineer, Databricks Champion)
Learn how to design secure and scalable governance with Unity Catalog: modeling access across catalogs/schemas/tables, implementing lineage and auditing for compliance, and applying promotion patterns across workspaces while avoiding common pitfalls.

Building & Evaluating AI Agents (Nicolás Peláez, GenAI and ML at Databricks)
Discover how to design agentic workflows on the Lakehouse—tool use, retrieval, orchestration, and guardrails—then evaluate them with offline/online tests, task-success metrics, and tracing-driven iteration. Finally, see how to productionize with serving, vector search, and Unity Catalog integration.

🔹What you’ll learn ✨

In Unity Catalog Governance (Aldis Stareczek, Qubika · Databricks Champion) you’ll learn how to model secure access across catalogs/schemas/tables , implement lineage & auditing for compliance and troubleshooting, and apply promotion patterns across workspaces while avoiding common pitfalls.

In Building & Evaluating AI Agents (Nicolás Peláez, Databricks) you’ll design agentic workflows on the Lakehouse—tool use, retrieval, orchestration, and guardrails then evaluate them with offline/online tests, task-success metrics, and tracing-driven iteration, and finally productionize with serving, vector search, and Unity Catalog integration.

Expect a night of live demos, insightful discussions, food & drinks, and plenty of opportunities to connect with fellow data and AI professionals.

🔹Speakers

Aldis Stareczek: "Unity Catalog: Unified Data Governance in Databricks"
Solutions Engineer, Qubika | Databricks Champion
Aldis helps financial and enterprise teams design reliable, governed data platforms on the Lakehouse. Her focus spans data governance, lineage, secure access controls, and operational excellence for analytics and AI workloads.

Nicolas Pelaez :"Building and Evaluating AI Agents on Databricks"
Generative AI, Data Science & Machine Learning at Databricks
Nicolas is a Databricks specialist in AI agents on the Lakehouse, designing and evaluating agentic workflows (tool use, retrieval, orchestration, guardrails) and turning them into clear, data-driven demos for real-world use. He leverages AI to communicate complex ideas with clarity and production focus. Trained in aerospace engineering and data science, he previously worked as a Turbine Performance Engineer, monitoring military jet engines and building advanced control models to ensure safety and performance.

🔹Event Format

✅ Technical Talks: Presentations from experts covering architecture, best practices, use cases, and the latest Databricks trends.

🔹Logistics (Getting there, Parking info)

🚗 Free Parking is available both in the building and outside if the lot is full. Please do not use reserved parking spots.

Once you get to 1141 Shady Lane look for and enter the building through the large iron door. Take the elevator on the left and make your way up to the third floor. Once you exit the elevator, turn right, and you’ll find Suite 305 on your left, just before the stairs.

🎯 Who should attend?

• IT Professionals interested in Big Data, Machine Learning and building AI Agents
• Companies, Startups and teams using (or wanting to use) Databricks
• Data Engineers & Architects
• Data Scientists & Analysts
• Networking & Community

📩 Register and become part of the Databricks community in Austin! 🚀

About Databricks
Databricks is a unified, cloud-based platform for data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and AI, built on Apache Spark. It helps organizations streamline large-scale data processing, accelerate the development of AI models, and enable seamless collaboration across data teams.
www.databricks.com

About Qubika
Qubika is a global technology company that designs, builds, and scales AI-powered software products. As a Select Tier partner of Databricks, our teams specialize in data architectures, machine learning, and agentic workflows - helping companies across industries unlock the full value of their data. With over 800 experts across the Americas, we bring deep technical knowledge and real-world experience to every solution.
www.qubika.com