GenAI transforming Engineering

Join us for an in-person evening exploring how GenAI is transforming modern engineering — from low-code feature engineering and research workflows to agent-driven optimization and production ML systems.
Please make sure you register with your full name, as it will be checked by security on arrival.
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📅 Date and Time:
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Doors open: 17:30
Talks start: 18:00
Panel discussion: 19:20
Networking & pizza: 20:00
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📍 Location: Zalando Office BHW
Warschauer S-Bahn, Auditorium Cinema
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📝 Agenda:
17:30 – Doors Open
Arrivals and check-in
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18:00 – Talk #1
Research Harness Engineering
Florian Hönicke — Elastic
Every programmer is now a manager of coding agents — but human oversight quickly becomes the bottleneck. Florian will share how Elasticsearch built an agentic research harness to support their v5-omni model development, enabling structured experimentation and faster iteration cycles in applied AI research, and why building your own harness is the key unlock for teams serious about scaling agentic workflows.
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18:20 – Talk #2
Low code feature engineering in Zalando with Agentic support
Ola Wahab — Zalando
Feature engineering at scale has traditionally been a high-friction process — days of infra setup, complex tooling coordination, and lots of boilerplate. Ola will walk through how Zalando is shifting to a low-code, configuration-driven approach where teams define pipelines declaratively, and how agentic coding has compressed the journey from feature discovery to production from weeks to days.
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18:40 – Talk #3
Ranking Logic Migration from Monolith — Using Code Agents for Iterative Performance Benchmarking
Ivan Potapov — Zalando
How Zalando’s Search and Browse Discovery team extracted a latency-critical ranking service from a monolith and validated it for production.
This talk covers:

• Migrating the ranking read path into a standalone Ranking API
• Using AI-powered agentic loops with async-profiler to close the p99 latency gap
• Practical lessons on allocation profiling, virtual threads, and production validation

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19:00 – Talk #4
Coding Agents for ML Pipelines & AI Systems (Hopsworks + Claude Code)
Jim Dowling — Hopsworks
Coding agents are rapidly reshaping software and ML engineering. This talk explores how prompt-driven development is changing how we build ML systems.
We’ll cover:

• ML problem decomposition and architecture optimization in an agent-driven world
• Data-driven experimentation workflows
• Building faster and higher-quality systems with Claude Code
• Why building on top of AI infrastructure boosts productivity

Based on Jim’s O’Reilly book: Building AI Systems with a Feature Store
Format: 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A
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19:20 – Panel Discussion
Product Mindset in Engineering — The Evolution of the AI Engineer Role
**Host: Ivan Potapov
Jim Dowling — CEO, Hopsworks
Leela Sharma — Director of Engineering, Zalando
Alexey Grigorev — Founder, DataTalks.Club
Florian Hönicke — Principal AI Engineer, Elastic
A discussion on how GenAI is reshaping engineering roles, expectations, and the shift toward product-oriented thinking.
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20:00 – Pizza, Drinks & Networking
Wrap up the evening with food, drinks and conversations with fellow engineers and speakers.
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Invite your friends and join us for an evening of learning and networking!

⚡️ Interested in giving a talk? ⚡️
Are you interested presenting on your Elastic use case? We welcome 5-10 minute lightning talks, 45-minute deep dives, and everything in between. If you're interested, please send an email to meetups@elastic.co