GDG Sydney Meetup February 2026

GDG Cloud Sydney is back for a meetup this February! 

Join us for an evening of exciting technical talks, community connections, and knowledge sharing.

Come Hire!
The meetup allocates 10 minutes to people seeking technical jobs or with open roles at their company. If you’re hiring or job hunting, this is your chance to connect with the community.

👉 This meetup is in-person only — there are no plans to stream the event.

Partners
This meetup is organised in partnership with Mantel Group. They harness technologies that transform business operations in the real world. With capabilities spanning Cloud, Data, Digital, and Security, they merge emerging technologies with innovative design and industry expertise to enhance your business. With deep technical specialisation and as a leading Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud partner, the depth and breadth of their solutions is unparalleled. Mantel Group is your partner for end-to-end digital transformation.

Ranked in Australia's top 10 Best Workplaces by Great Place To Work Australia for four years in a row, Mantel Group is people-focused and upholds strong values. Their culture champions trust, empowerment, and diversity with a lean structure emphasizing collaboration, direct communication, and equity.

Dented Code teaches coding skills that you need to become a full-stack developer and help you advance your career, pursue your dream job, or enjoy the freedom of life as a freelancer. – Learn more on their website.

We will also give out two 1-year subscriptions from JetBrains to any of JetBrains' IDEs and two programmable event tickets in a raffle. Winners can choose from tools like IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, PyCharm, WebStorm, Rider, and more.

Talks
Talk 1: Reliable Agent Engineering: A Framework to Tame the Unpredictable
About the Speaker - Sharat Madanapalli

Sharat has spent the last decade working in AI—from hands-on research to leading teams that deliver production-grade AI systems. Sharat uses his experience to help organizations turn ambitious AI ideas into practical strategies and real-world outcomes. He works closely with executives to define clear AI roadmaps, identify the opportunities that truly create business value, and then help build the systems that bring those ideas to life—from data platforms to AI agents operating in production.

In this session, Sharat will talk about Reliable Agent Engineering. Agents are genuinely smart and surprisingly helpful—when everything goes to plan. But throw in messy inputs or flaky APIs, and your agent starts making decisions like it's had three drinks. It makes bold moves, skips critical steps, and occasionally responds with complete nonsense. In this session, we'll introduce a practical framework to sober them up through three core practices that keep agents coherent when the real world throws curveballs.

First, Observe: we'll define agent trajectories and instrument them with tracing so you can see the actual reasoning paths, tool choices, and context access patterns your agent follows in production. Second, Harden: we'll apply reliability engineering to agents using patterns like retries, timeouts, fallbacks, and checkpointing to keep behavior stable even when LLMs, tools, or networks misbehave. Third, Validate: we'll turn problematic traces and incidents into a living evaluation suite with tool-level and end-to-end tests to close the gap between expected and actual behavior. If you're moving agents beyond toy demos, you'll leave with a concrete framework for making them reliable in the real world.

Talk 2: Memory Is the New Attack Surface: Securing Stateful AI on Google Kubernetes Engine
About the Speaker - Aditya Dattatreya
Aditya is a DevOps Engineer for 2 years at Avathon, finished 11 research papers in AI/ML, 5 hackathon wins, including kaggle in AI/ML, 50+ blogs, featured in Cyber Kings India magazine, and awarded the young achiever in DevOps and AI field by Cyber Kings magazine, and also featured in times square new york as top mentor in DevOps. He has founded 2 tech communities and is part of 7-8 more in India. Currently, he is pursuing my Masters in Cybersecurity (MS) at The University of Sydney and is interested in AI/ML, DevOps, Cloud, Cybersecurity, and Open Source.

In this Session, Aditya will talk about AI systems that are no longer stateless. Agents, RAG pipelines, and conversational AI now rely on persistent memory, which quietly creates a new and dangerous attack surface. In this talk, he will demonstrate how a memory-enabled AI running on Google Kubernetes Engine can be compromised through memory poisoning, even when IAM, network policies, and code-level security are correctly configured. Using Google resources and open-source tools, I will demonstrate how Kubearmor can be utilized to enforce runtime behavior, prevent malicious memory writes, and secure AI workloads in real-time. The people will get to know a practical, Kubernetes-native approach to securing stateful AI systems.

Event Schedule

5:30 pm - Event doors open

5:45 pm - Introduction and hiring connect (5 mins for each group, every participant gets up to 1 min)

6:00 pm - Talk 1: Reliable Agent Engineering: A Framework to Tame the Unpredictable — Sharat Madanapalli

6:45 pm - Talk 2: Memory Is the New Attack Surface: Securing Stateful AI on Google Kubernetes Engine — Aditya Dattatreya

7:15 pm - Raffle for 2 JetBrains IDE licenses and programmable event tickets

7:45 pm - Event end

Agenda

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Hosted By

Reeya Maharjan,

Shital Shrestha, Community Organiser

Rohit Maharjan, Community Organiser

Hi, I’m Rohit, a dedicated software engineer with 2 years of experience and a
keen interest in transitioning to a DevOps role. I have a strong background in
building digital solutions using PHP, JavaScript (React.js), and MySQL. My
passion for cloud technologies and continuous integration/deployment
(CI/CD) drives me to further develop my skills in DevOps. I am eager to
leverage my development experience and cloud knowledge to contribute to
a dynamic DevOps team.

Sajan Shrestha, Community organiser

Shasanka Acharya, Community Organiser

Ryan Snowden, Community Organiser

Katharine Russell, Software Engineer

Gary Lou, Community organiser

Kunal Ostwal,

Luke Moody, Founder

Russal Arya, Community organiser

Roshan Ghale, Community organiser

A passionate Software Engineer skilled in JavaScript, React, Node.js, as well as Salesforce Development. Currently I am working as a Software Engineer at Practifi.

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Partners

Mantel Group (https://mantelgroup.com.au/)
Mantel Group harnesses technologies that transform business operations in the real world. With capabilities spanning Cloud, Data, Digital, and Security, they merge emerging technologies with innovative design and industry expertise to enhance your business. With deep technical specialisation and as leading Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud partners, the depth and breadth our solutions offer is unparalleled. Mantel Group is your partner for end-to-end digital transformation.

Ranked in Australia's top 10 Best Workplaces by Great Place To Work Australia for four years in a row, we are people-focused and uphold strong values. Our culture champions trust, empowerment, and diversity, with a lean structure that emphasises collaboration, direct communication and equity.

Dented Code (https://dentedcode.com)
At Dented Code, we have developed an innovative coding Bootcamp approach to empower candidates with cutting-edge technology and skills to thrive in the Australian multi-billion-dollar digital economy. In 2021, Dented Code began transferring its programming skills to students through BootCamp courses, in-school workshops, community upskilling initiatives, and online tutorials. Through Dented Code’s BootCamp, students get equipped with in-demand coding and web development skills.

JetBrains (https://www.jetbrains.com)
At JetBrains, code is our passion. Ever since we started, back in 2000, we have strived to make the strongest, most effective developer tools on earth. By automating routine checks and corrections, our tools speed up production, freeing developers to grow, discover and create.

Our Mission
We make professional software development a more productive and enjoyable experience.

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Complete your event RSVP here: https://gdg.community.dev/events/details/google-gdg-cloud-sydney-presents-gdg-sydney-meetup-february-2026/.