GDG Sydney Meetup April 2026

GDG Cloud Sydney is back for a meetup this April!

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 their 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, 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: Beyond Vibes: Building Rigorous Evaluation Systems for Production AI Agents
AI agents are no longer a research curiosity — over half of organizations now run agents in production, yet quality remains the single biggest barrier to reliable deployment. The problem is structural: the same properties that make agents powerful (multi-step reasoning, tool use, adaptive behaviour) make them fundamentally resistant to the evaluation methods we inherited from classical NLP and single-turn LLMs. BLEU scores and spot-checking don't survive contact with a 40-turn agentic trajectory.

This talk builds a practical framework for teams shipping agents at enterprise scale. We'll cover how to design evaluation harnesses that distinguish transcript quality from outcome quality, when to trust LLM-as-judge versus human review, and how to layer offline regression suites with online production monitoring. Drawing on real deployment patterns in regulated industries, we'll examine where evals break down — and what it costs when they do. You'll leave with concrete primitives for turning agent evaluation from a research problem into an engineering practice your whole team can own.

About the speaker — Tanya Dixit
Tanya Dixit is a Machine Learning expert at Google who helps engineering teams across Australia, India, Singapore, and Europe build better AI solutions. Before Google, she served as a Machine Learning Engineer at Crayon, where she led the development of scalable AI deployment and monitoring frameworks, contributed to generative AI infrastructure (LLMOps), and delivered enterprise-grade solutions across cloud platforms. Tanya earned her Master's in Machine Learning and Computer Vision from ANU, graduating with First Class Honours and snagging the University Medal along the way.

When she's not building AI systems, Tanya loves mentoring at startup accelerators, writing AI newsletters that cut through the hype, and speaking about how to make technology more inclusive. Her thing is helping companies figure out the right problems to solve with AI—because let's be honest, the tech is only as good as the problems you point it at. She's big on the idea that collaborative intelligence can make entire engineering teams (and communities) way more effective.

Talk 2: Code isn’t just logic, it’s language. Discover why minding your language in tech matters.
AI and data engineering were the hottest jobs of 2025 — full of excitement, confusion, and more than a few failed projects. One thing is clear: the genie is out of the bottle, and the demand for solid data and AI engineering isn’t slowing down. So how do you ride this wave and actually build a career in it? In this session, we'll try to navigate that.

About the speaker — Monika Bhatt

Monika is currently a Senior Technical Writer at TAL and has over a decade of experience in technical writing/content design. Before TAL, she worked at Canva, Transport for NSW, and the NSW Department of Customer Service. She is passionate about making complex tech simple and holds a Master's in Information Technology and a Bachelor's in Electronics and Communication Engineering.

Event Schedule

5:30pm - Event doors open

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

6:00pm - Talk 1:Beyond Vibes: Building Rigorous Evaluation Systems for Production AI Agents — Tanya Dixit

6:45pm - Talk 2: Code isn’t just logic, it’s language. Discover why minding your language in tech matters. — Monika Bhatt

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

7:45pm - Event end

Agenda

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Speakers

Tanya Dixit - Google (GenAI Solution Architect)

Tanya is a Generative AI Solutions Architect at Google, where she drives AI innovation and strategic programs, leveraging technologies like Vertex AI and Kubeflow. Previously, she led machine learning initiatives at Crayon, specializing in LLMOps and cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure. As the former Editor-in-Chief of The Future Stack, Canberra’s first AI newsletter, she helped shape AI tho…

Monika Bhatt - Canva (Senior Technical Writer)

Monika is currently working as a Senior Technical Writer at Canva and has over a decade of experience in tech writing in freelance as well as full-time projects for more than 25 companies. Prior to Canva, she worked for Transport for NSW projects, and also worked as a Senior Technical Writer in Nepal.
Monika holds a Masters in Information Technology and a Bachelors in Electronics and Co…

Hosted By

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

Kunal Ostwal, Community Organizer

Hi there!
I am a PhD Candidate at University of Sydney specialising in robotics, machine learning and its medical applications. Apart from that, I am a GDG organiser and I am an avid trekker. If any of these sound interesting to you, reach out!

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.

Gary Lou, Community organiser

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