AI Native Netherlands

AI at Enterprise Scale: From Model Efficiency to Organizational Change

Tue, Oct 27 · 18:00 CET

AWS Amsterdam, Mr.Treublaan 7, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam, NL

UPDATE – Unfortunately, William Rizzo is unable to join us tonight. We're happy to welcome Vladimir Malyk from Booking.com, who has kindly agreed to step in on very short notice. The event will otherwise go ahead as planned!

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Running AI effectively requires both the right infrastructure and an approach to adoption that works across engineering teams.

For our 13th AI Native Netherlands meetup, Christian Melendez from AWS will explore when CPUs and smaller models make more sense than GPU-backed LLMs.

Vladimir Malyk from Booking.com will share his experience with GenAI organizational transformation, including the challenges of introducing AI into established engineering teams and processes.

Together, the talks will look at both the technical and organizational sides of putting AI into practice.

A huge thank you to our friends at AWS for hosting us at their Amsterdam office. Food and drinks will be provided!

We'll cover:

• When AI workloads actually need GPUs — and when CPUs and smaller models are the better fit.
• How to combine Small Language Models and larger LLMs without sending every task to the most expensive model.
• The organizational challenges of introducing GenAI into established engineering teams.
• How AI adoption affects engineering processes, collaboration, and ways of working.
• Lessons from AI adoption and organizational transformation at Booking.com.

Speaker 1: Christian Melendez (AWS)
Christian Melendez is a Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, helping large enterprises build efficient, resilient AI and cloud-native workloads on Kubernetes. He is the author of Kubernetes Autoscaling, creator of Karpenter Blueprints, which helped grow Karpenter adoption 16.5x across EMEA, and developer of Slemify, an open-source framework for fine-tuning and serving Small Language Models on Kubernetes. A regular speaker at AWS re:Invent, KCDs, and ContainerDays, he focuses on making infrastructure simpler, more observable, and cost-effective.

Talk: The Right Tool for the Right Token: When to Reach for a CPU or a GPU
While hard reasoning problems require an LLM and a GPU, other tasks can be solved with simpler means. Classifying, routing, embedding, and reranking are structured, high-frequency jobs that a fine-tuned small model (SLM) can handle on CPU at predictable cost. In this session, we will demo a pipeline where each task runs on the best fitting infrastructure.

This will include a real CPU-first agent on Amazon EKS running an SLM, and calling an LLM when needed. We will share our learnings from building this pipeline, including how we measured price/performance, its limitations, and which of our design assumptions we found to be wrong.

You will leave with confidence to choose the right tool, and an open-source reference architecture to validate your assumptions.

Speaker 2: Volodymyr Malyk (Booking.com)
Vladimir Malyk is an Engineering Manager and Software Engineer at Booking.com with over 18 years of experience in product companies. His recent work spans GenAI organizational transformation, fintech, AI/ML, big data, and high-load platforms.

He is also a public speaker and co-organizer of the Ukraine Software Architects Club and Amsterdam Scala.

Talk: GenAI Organizational Transformation at Booking.com
Introducing GenAI into an established engineering organization involves more than giving teams access to new tools. It raises questions about how AI fits into existing development processes, how teams adopt it, and what organizational changes are needed to support its use.

Drawing on his experience at Booking.com, Vladimir will discuss AI adoption from an organizational perspective, including the challenges of introducing GenAI into existing engineering practices and the changes involved in making it part of everyday work.

Agenda:
18:00 — Arrival, food & drinks
18:45 — Talk #1 | Christian Melendez (AWS)
19:30 — Talk #2 | Volodymyr Malyk (Booking.com)
20:15 — Open conversation, networking & more drinks
21:00 — Wrapping up

What to bring:
Just curiosity and questions. If you're working on applied AI, AI adoption, engineering transformation, MLOps, or the infrastructure behind AI systems, we'd love to hear how you're approaching it.

Who this is for:
AI/ML engineers, platform engineers, MLOps specialists, SREs, infrastructure engineers, architects, engineering leaders, and anyone working on AI adoption and engineering transformation.

Where to find us:
AWS Office: Mr. Treublaan 7, 1097 JS Amsterdam

AI-Native Engineering: Coding Agents, Memory & Collaboration

Wed, Nov 25 · 18:00 CET

Xebia Netherlands BV, Wibautstraat 200, 1091 TJ Amsterdam, Netherlands, Amsterdam, NH, NL

AI Native Netherlands is back! We'll be hosting our 14th edition at the Xebia office in Amsterdam, and this is our last meetup of the year.

A huge thank you to our friends at Xebia for hosting us and providing food and drinks. This is the second time Xebia has had us over, the OGs among you will remember the early editions.

This time, we're looking at two challenges that come with AI-assisted software development. First, how coding agents handle memory and context across sessions. Then, how teams can rethink collaboration when AI changes the speed of development and what individuals can accomplish on their own.

We'll cover:

• What coding agents actually remember, and what survives between sessions.
• The difference between session history and persistent memory, and why it matters.
• How Claude Code handles memory, with comparisons to Codex and Pi.
• Why traditional ways of collaborating may no longer work as AI accelerates development.
• How teams can establish clear responsibilities, shared standards, and processes that keep everyone aligned.
• What needs to change as individual developers become capable of doing more with AI.

Speaker 1: Vladislav Ramazaev (BlueDolphin)
Vlad is a Senior Software Engineer at BlueDolphin with 10+ years of experience in architecture and system design, across distributed systems, data pipelines and high-load services in C#/.NET, Kotlin and TypeScript.

At BlueDolphin, he works on the microservices behind an enterprise architecture SaaS platform. Previously, he built data pipelines for AI model training and evaluation and led architecture and delivery practices across multiple engineering teams.

Talk: Inside Coding Agents: What Survives Between Sessions
Your coding agent can recover a decision from months ago, but did it actually remember it?

This technical talk goes inside real coding-agent sessions to examine what gets stored, what survives context compaction, and what the model can access later. Using Claude Code as the main example, with focused contrasts from Codex and Pi, we'll separate session history from persistent memory and see how a correct observation can become harmful when its original scope is lost.

You'll leave with a clearer model of agent memory and practical principles for deciding what should be loaded automatically, reviewed regularly, or retrieved only when needed.

Speaker 2: Alexander Fisher (Xebia)
Alexander has a decade of experience in data, working across the full data stack, and now focuses on dbt. He takes pride in building elegant, scalable solutions and working closely with teams. Teaching, sharing knowledge, and helping others improve code quality are important parts of his work.

Talk: Collaboration in the Age of AI: A Process-Based Approach
AI is changing how quickly we develop software and how much we can accomplish individually. But many of the formal and informal conventions we've relied on to collaborate effectively aren't keeping up.

As individual capabilities grow, how do we make sure teams still work well together?

Alexander will explore how a process-based approach can help teams adapt to this shift. How do we establish clear responsibilities, maintain shared standards, and make sure everyone knows where to focus their efforts when the way we work is changing so quickly?

The talk looks at what needs to change in team collaboration as AI becomes a bigger part of everyday development.

Agenda:
18:00 — Arrival, food & drinks
18:45 — Talk #1 | Vladislav Ramazaev
19:30 — Talk #2 | Alexander Fisher
20:15 — Open conversation, networking & more drinks
21:00 — Wrapping up

What to bring:
Just curiosity and your own questions. Whether you're experimenting with coding agents, dealing with context and memory limitations, or figuring out how AI is changing collaboration within your team, we'd love to hear your experiences.

Who this is for:
Software engineers, AI engineers, data engineers, architects, tech leads, and engineering leaders working with AI-assisted development or exploring how AI is changing engineering teams.

Where to find us:
Xebia, Wibautstraat 200, 1091 TJ Amsterdam — Google Maps Link

One last thing:
Since this is our final edition of the year, come and close it out with us. Thank you for a great year, enjoy the holidays, and we'll see you at the end of January for the first meetup of 2027.