Scaling AI in Production: AIOps, Architecture, and Human Oversight

We are thrilled to welcome you to our 9th edition of AI Native Netherlands, hosted at the Miro headquarters in Amsterdam.

We look forward to seeing you again for another evening with the AI Native community. This edition brings together operational AI, architecture leadership, and real world system design.

If there are specific topics or formats you would like to see in future meetups, feel free to reach out. This community is shaped by the engineers in the room.

A massive thank you to our host, Miro, for providing the venue, food, and drinks for this evening and for supporting the Dutch AI engineering community.

We’ll cover:

• Designing AI-powered AIOps Command Centers for predictive intelligence and self-healing infrastructure
• Replacing reactive maintenance with unified observability and automated diagnostics in B2B SaaS core banking
• Preserving architectural intent while AI agents accelerate software delivery
• Aligning AI initiatives with governance frameworks and AI Native infrastructure principles

Speaker 1: Shekhar Kachole (Independant Consultant)
Shekhar Kachole is a results-oriented visionary Chief Technology Officer with over 30 years of experience in the technology industry.

Known for consistently breaking new ground, he produces value by enhancing existing capabilities and delivering innovative solutions that yield lasting engineering and financial benefits for organizations.
As a dynamic and strategic leader and a certified Chief AI Officer, Shekhar has a proven track record of proactively addressing customer needs and expectations, both internally and externally.

Thriving in demanding, multi-task environments, he excels in providing cost-effective project designs and leading large-scale digital transformations using AI & Big Data across various geographies.
Shekhar is a motivational leader skilled in identifying critical team members to build strong project teams. An articulate communicator, he effectively engages with diverse groups at all corporate levels and is an organized planner with excellent time management skills.

Key areas of focus:

• Driving sustainable growth and competitive advantage by tying AI initiatives are integrated into the company’s strategic plan.
• Leading the end-to-end execution of scalable AI solutions that demonstrably optimize operations and unlock data-driven revenue streams.
• Establishing robust governance frameworks that ensure ethical AI practices and data privacy to build trust with customers, regulators, and stakeholders.
• Cultivating a world-class AI/ML talent engine and fostering a culture of continuous innovation

Talk: AI-Powered Operational Intelligence in B2B Saas Core Banking Platform
Operational excellence has become the defining battleground in B2B SaaS core banking. As financial institutions demand near-zero downtime and rapid innovation cycles, legacy monolithic architectures are increasingly strained. Engineering capacity is often consumed by reactive maintenance, production incidents, and fragile deployment pipelines — creating significant operational drag.
This talk explores the shift toward an AI-first operating model. By introducing predictive intelligence, unified observability, automated diagnostics, and self-healing infrastructure, organizations can reduce accumulated technical debt and reposition their platforms for scale, reliability, and faster feature delivery.
The session outlines how an AI-powered AIOps Command Center can transform operational constraints into strategic advantage, establishing a foundation for more autonomous and resilient systems.

Speaker 2: Kenny Schwegler (Software Architecture Enabler at DHL eCommerce and Independent Trainer at Weave IT)
Kenny (Baas) Schwegler believes in collaborative software design where “every voice shapes the software.” Leveraging a domain-driven design approach and Team Topologies, he facilitates clearer communication between stakeholders and software creators through collaborative modelling and deep democracy. His work focuses on decoding complexity, resolving conflict, and ensuring software remains adaptable to evolving business demands.
As Lead Software Architect for DHL BeNeLux, independent consultant, and trainer, he specializes in technical leadership, software architecture, and sociotechnical system design. He works with organizations and teams to design and build sustainable and resilient software architectures.

Talk: Facilitating Software Architecture While AI Agents Write the Code
AI agents are accelerating software delivery. Code ships faster than ever before. The open question is whether architecture improves at the same pace.
Developers have always made implicit architectural decisions. What has changed is the speed at which those decisions are made — and increasingly, delegated. When AI systems generate code based on incomplete context, assumptions are embedded into design choices as if they were intentional. These assumptions compound over time, often without visibility.
This session explores how implicit architectural drift emerges in AI-assisted development, how cognitive biases amplify the problem, and how teams can retain architectural clarity and deliberate design while leveraging AI acceleration.
The focus is on keeping architecture intentional, explicit, and human-led in an AI-accelerated engineering environment.

Speaker 3: Riccardo M. Cefala (Engineering Manager at Miro)
Riccardo is an engineering manager with 15+ years of experience building and scaling platform, data, and infrastructure teams across SaaS, FinTech, and enterprise tech. He currently leads Storage & Database platforms at Miro, helping support 100M+ users globally.

He enjoys working at the intersection of systems and strategy—whether that’s scaling cloud platforms, improving reliability, or making developers more productive. His experience spans building cloud platforms from zero to global scale and modernizing enterprise data infrastructure.

He is also a co-founder of External Secrets Operator, an open-source project widely used in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Speaker 4: Paul Doran (Senior Engineering Manager, AI Platform at Miro)
Paul Doran is the Senior Engineering Manager for AI Context at Miro, leading the team solving context across Miro's product. A PhD in Computer Science (University of Liverpool) with a focus on multi-agent systems, Paul brings over 15 years of experience in distributed systems, data engineering and ML platforms. He is currently interested in how agentic workflows are transforming the software development lifecycle.

Talk: Why AI changes everything and everything stays the same
The advent of AI code generation promises an army of “10x” developers, but this efficiency gain is a false promise if not paired with operational maturity. Building software is constrained by system-wide bottlenecks, making the ability to ship and maintain code and systems the ultimate competitive advantage. This efficiency triggers Jevons’ Paradox: cheaper code leads to a “Code Tsunami”—more code, not less work—escalating risk due to increased batch sizes, complexity and higher change failure rates.

The true bottleneck is shifting from merely writing more code to ensuring its rapid, safe release in production. Technology, specifically AI, will not fix a broken engineering culture. To capitalize on the AI revolution, organizations must pivot investment from pure code generation to mastering release engineering and embedding operational discipline, such as proper testing, small batch sizes, and robust CD practices. This shift is the only “lifeboat” in the coming deluge of new code.

Agenda:
18:00 — Arrival, food & drinks
18:30 — Talk #1 | Shekhar Kachole
19:00 — Talk #2 | Kenny Schwegler
20:00 — Break
20:15 — Talk #3 | Riccardo & Paul
20:45 — Networking & more drinks
21:00 — Wrapping up

What to bring: Just curiosity and questions. We’ll be exploring AIOps, AI Agents, and AI/ML governance, and we’d love to hear your questions during the Interactive Panel.

Who is this for: Platform engineers, AI/ML engineers, SREs, architects, and engineering leaders focused on building and validating reliable AI systems in production.

Where to find us: Miro, Cozy Cafe, Fred. Roeskestraat 100, 1076 ED Amsterdam, Netherlands