Managing the Machines: Engineering Management in the Age of Autonomous Coding

Join us at our next in-person Tech Leadership meetup in Johannesburg.

There will be drinks and snacks to kickoff the evening.

The event will be hosted at the Jem offices in Sandton, Johannesburg.

The agenda for the evening will be as follows:
17:30 - 18:00 - Arrival: Drinks and snacks.
18:00 - 18:05 - Introduction and house rules.
18:05 - 19:00 - Main speaker - Thamsanqa Moyo (CTO at Jem).
19:00 - 19:30 - Networking and wrap up.

Topic of Main Talk - Managing the Machines: Engineering Management in the Age of Autonomous Coding

Some engineering managers are quietly asking: What does my job look like when agents write all the code? At Jem we built a harness that polls Linear, dispatches Claude agents into our service repositories, and ships into production autonomously. This talk covers our experience so far and the implications we see for tech leadership jobs when there are more machines to manage than people. Honest lessons from the first six weeks in, including what didn't work, for engineering managers trying to figure out their role in this next chapter.

Thamsanqa is the CTO at Jem, the leading platform for managing and engaging deskless workforces in South Africa. He leads engineering, AI, and platform across Jem's Employee Benefits, Comms and HR products. He is building Jem's engineering function to be AI-native, where engineers spend most of their time building, dispatching, and supervising agents rather than writing code by hand. He writes regularly about AI-native engineering on LinkedIn and contributes to Jem Open, the company's open-source repo.