Google SRE NYC Tech Talk

Google SRE NYC proudly announces our second Tech Talk in 2026.

The event will take place on June 23rd 2026, 6:30-9pm.
Pls RSVP only if you're able to attend in-person, there will be no live streaming. Pls enter your name exactly as it appears on your government issued ID. You will be required to present your ID at check in.
For our repeat attendees, pls note the change of time and location! We’ll be hosting our event at the main Chelsea Campus building, the mothership, the OG, Google NYC-9th. Pls use the 8th Ave lobby entrance (corner of 8th Ave and 15th St, see the photo of the entrance on this page). The check-in will start at 6:00 in the lobby and talks will start at 6:30 sharp, pls allow sufficient time for commuting and check-in.

As always, the event will include 3 exciting tech talks, a Q&A and an opportunity to mingle with the speakers and attendees over some light snacks and beverages.

Agenda:

Shahram Anver, CEO & Co-Founder at Cleric
How We Stop an AI SRE assistant from Jumping to Conclusions
AI agents are confidently wrong in ways that matter in production. They latch onto the first plausible theory, ignoring evidence that contradicts it, and present their conclusions with full confidence. SREs already know this failure mode from junior engineers. The question is what to do about it structurally.
This talk covers the specific techniques cleric.ai uses to keep it’s investigation agent honest: forcing it to declare competing hypotheses before gathering evidence, preventing it from editing earlier reasoning, and running a mandatory audit that checks for confirmation bias, unexplored alternatives, and correlation-vs-causation errors. You’ll see how these patterns work in a real OOM kill investigation.

Salim Virji SRE at Google
& Max Saltonstall Developer Advocate at Datadog
Monitoring AI workloads in large production deployments
Training new models? Onboarding new customers for your AI workflows? Both?? AI systems are constantly changing, and training workloads require a fresh perspective on monitoring in order to develop insights that help you understand how your systems use resources and perform at scale. Learn how you can accurately and usefully monitor AI workloads in large production deployments.

Max Saltonstall tells stories about the Cloud, how to tell where it’s working (or not), and what diverse solutions our customers have created. He’s part of Datadog’s Advocacy team, with a passion for storytelling, narrative and dad jokes. Max loves to juggle, eat new foods and play games of all types. He lives in New York City with his partner and two children.

Salim Virji develops reliable engineering practices and processes for Google’s SRE organization, and has built consensus and storage services for Google infrastructure. Salim’s interests include distributed systems and machine learning. He has contributed to several books on SRE, including The Site Reliability Workbook and Implementing Service Level Objectives. Salim received an AB in Classics from the University of Chicago and is a New York City Master Composter.

Damola Obaleke Software Engineer at The New York Times
Building an Incident Management API

In this talk we will discuss how The New York Times built an Incident Management API (and runs it with 99% uptime) to manage production incidents and P1s to ensure reliability of its systems.

In his spare time Damola likes working with MCP and Building an Agentic-AI tax filing system, playing tennis and video games and hitting the gym. He also owns a video streaming platform for Black anime.

Our Tech Talks series are for professional development and networking: no recruiters, sales or press please! Google is committed to providing a harassment-free and inclusive conference experience for everyone, and all participants must follow our Event Community Guidelines. The event will be photographed and video recorded.
Event space is limited! A reservation is required to attend. Reserve your spot today and share the event details with your SRE/DevOps friends 🙂