GenAI transforming Engineering: Agents and Guardrails [IN-PERSON!]
Details
Meet us for in-person talks at Zalando on February 17, 2026!
Join us for an evening of practical talks on how GenAI is reshaping modern engineering workflows, from code agents to production-grade, guardrailed systems.
Please make sure you register with your full name, as it will be checked by security on arrival.
📅Date and Time:
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
Doors open: 18:00
Opening & announcements: 18:30
Talks start: 18:35
Wrap-up & networking: ~20:30
📍Location: Zalando Office BHW
Berlin Hedwig-Wachenheimstraße 7 (BHW)
The main entrance is on the west-side of the building (towards Uber Arena). Participants should register at the Helpdesk, and will be picked up from there.
📝 Agenda:
18:00 – Doors Open Pizza, drinks, and networking
18:30 – Opening Short welcome and announcements from the organizers (5 min)
### 18:35 – Talk #1
Building Blocks of Modern Code Agents: Reusable Skills and Role-Based Subagents
Alexey Grigorev — DataTalk.Club
A practical map of modern code agent types and the two key building blocks that make them reliable in real-world development workflows.
Code agents appear in many forms today: chat-based assistants, cloud agents running CI-like workflows, and IDE or terminal agents embedded directly into development environments. In this talk, we’ll map these main categories, discuss what each is good at, and highlight where they commonly fail.
We’ll then zoom in on two core building blocks used in modern agent tooling:
- Skills / playbooks — reusable, step-by-step workflows (e.g. understand the repo → implement a change → run checks → produce a clean diff)
- Subagents — specialized roles such as planner, implementer, reviewer, and tester that split complex work into focused, reliable steps
Format: 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A
### 19:05 – Talk #2
Guardrailed Agents at Scale: Zalando’s Support Agent for Incident Triage and Stakeholder Q&A
Ivan Potapov, Saugandh Karan — Zalando SE
We’ll share how Zalando built and shipped a specialized internal support agent that helps engineering teams answer stakeholder questions and triage operational alerts — without drowning in context or compromising production safety.
The agent enriches user requests with relevant observability context (metrics, logs, traces, recent deploys), summarizes what matters, and produces a severity assessment with recommended next steps.
A key challenge is context explosion: pulling “all the data” quickly becomes noisy, slow, and risky. We’ll walk through the architecture patterns and guardrails that keep the system production-ready:
- Retrieval and ranking strategies
- Strict tool boundaries
- Policy-driven response formats
- Evaluation checks to prevent overconfident or unsafe guidance
Finally, we’ll cover rollout and migration: introducing the agent alongside existing workflows, aligning it with architecture guidelines, and iterating based on real incident feedback.
Format: 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A
### 19:35 – Pizza, Drinks & Networking
Invite your friends and join our meetup. Special thanks to our hosts Zalando.