Databricks Bristol Meetup: April Edition

Bristol, we’re back.

After a cracking first meetup in February, we’re getting the Databricks Bristol community together again for a relaxed evening of practical chat, great content, familiar faces - and meeting new ones.

Massive thanks (again) to iO Associates for hosting and championing the group locally, and to Advancing Analytics and Databricks for backing it and helping us build a great community in Bristol. We're also grateful to the Data Bristol meetup and others for building such a great community already. Now, we get to build something special for Databricks.

What to expect - a relaxed evening of good people, practical Databricks chat, and networking (the kind where you actually meet people, not just collect LinkedIn connections you’ll never speak to again). Whether you’re deep in Spark, living your best Lakehouse life, or just Databricks-curious, you’re very welcome.

Speaker 1: Ashley Warren - How to be a Genie Space Genius in 20 mins.
Let Ashley walk you through how Genie Spaces (Databricks' way of letting you talk to your data) work, and how you can get started in 20 minutes - or less.

Speaker 2: Chris Durow - How to Secure Your Agents in Databricks
AI agents are moving fast but most teams shipping them haven't stress-tested what happens when someone tries to break them.
In this session, we'll walk through how to build a red teaming system for production-ready agents on Databricks: automated adversarial testing, attacker-style exploit attempts, and structured output reporting that works for both engineers and executives.
This is based on real work a hackathon project that built out the framework end-to-end, and an ongoing client engagement where we're putting this into practice for a team shipping their first in-house production agent.
If you're building agents and you haven't thought about how they fail under attack, this talk is for you.

What to expect

• A friendly, community-first meetup (no sales, no nonsense)
• A quick welcome from the organisers.
• A series of featured talks
• Drinks, pizza, and plenty of time to chat with other data folks

Agenda
5.30pm – Arrival + networking drinks
6.00pm – Introduction from the team
6.10pm – Ashley Warren
6.30pm - Chris Durow
7.00pm – Drinks + pizza + networking

Venue
Hosted at iO Associates, Bristol. (St Bartholomew's House, Bristol BS1 2NH)

RSVP
Spaces are limited, so please RSVP. If you can’t make it, do update your RSVP so someone else can grab your spot.

Who should come?

• Data engineers, analysts, scientists, platform folks, architects
• People building on Databricks (or evaluating it)
• Anyone into modern data + AI and learning from others doing it for real