AI Engineering meetup

👉 Get your tickets at tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes

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About the Day
The AI Engineering Day is Day 2 of DataEngBytes Sydney (Wednesday 29 July) — Oceania's largest community-run data engineering conference.
This is a full day dedicated to the engineering side of AI: not the hype, not the pitch decks — the real patterns, trade-offs, and production experience from practitioners who've actually shipped. Two tracks run in parallel across the day, with everyone converging for keynotes in the morning and the Town Hall close in the afternoon.

What's on
The day opens with two keynotes covering the fundamentals that underpin serious AI work right now. The first makes the case for context engineering as a proper engineering discipline — moving beyond prompting to systematically designing what flows into a model. The second digs into Model Context Protocol (MCP) in production: gateway patterns, security realities, and where the standard is heading after its rapid rise to Linux Foundation governance.

From there, two tracks run in parallel across the day covering:

• Evals and testing — building evaluation pipelines that catch regressions and don't require a PhD to interpret
• Agents in production — the reliability patterns, failure modes, and oversight requirements that separate a demo from something your organisation trusts
• AI coding tools — what the research actually says about productivity gains (the numbers might surprise you)
• RAG at scale — chunking, embedding freshness, retrieval quality, and what real RAG infrastructure looks like beyond the prototype
• The 80-to-95 gap — why getting an AI system from demo to production-grade takes disproportionate effort, and how to close it
• LLMs in the transform layer — where they genuinely help inside data pipelines and where they introduce risk
• skills.md — encoding domain knowledge and workflow patterns into reusable, versionable LLM interactions for your team
• LLM gateway patterns — routing, rate-limiting, cost control, and audit at the organisational level
• Vector databases in production — the real-world messiness behind the benchmarks
• Fine-tuning vs prompting — a practitioner's decision framework for when fine-tuning is actually worth the complexity
• AI agents for data quality — automating anomaly investigation, schema drift triage, and incident summarisation
• AI pipeline security — data poisoning, prompt injection, MCP tool abuse, and what defensive architecture looks like
• Autonomous data agents with Apache Flink — stateful stream processing as a foundation for long-running, event-driven agents

The day closes with a Town Hall — an open, community-run discussion on the topics that matter most to practitioners in the room.
This is a practitioner-led, vendor-neutral event. All talks go through a competitive CFP process and are selected on technical merit. No marketing sessions.

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🔖 TICKETS Tickets must be purchased via Ticket Tailor — this Meetup page is for discovery only.

• Single day (AI Engineering Day only): $299 AUD
• Both days (Data Engineering Day + AI Engineering Day): $499 AUD

👉 Get your tickets at tickettailor.com/events/dataengbytes