Meet us for in-person talks at Zalando on April 28, 2026!

Join us for an evening exploring how GenAI is transforming modern engineering — from low-code feature engineering and research workflows to agent-driven optimization and production ML systems.

Please make sure you register with your full name, as it will be checked by security on arrival.

📅 Date and Time:

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Doors open: 17:30

Talks start: 18:00

Panel discussion: 19:20

Networking & pizza: 20:00

📍 Location: Zalando Office BHW

Warschauer S-Bahn, Auditorium Cinema

📝 Agenda:

17:30 – Doors Open

Welcome, pizza, and networking

18:00 – Research Harness Engineering for Model Development

Florian Hönicke — Elastic

Every programmer is now a manager of coding agents — but human oversight quickly becomes the bottleneck. Florian will share how Elastic built an agentic research harness to support their v5-omni model development, enabling structured experimentation and faster iteration cycles in applied AI research, and why building your own harness is the key unlock for teams serious about scaling agentic workflows.

18:20 – Low-Code Feature Engineering in Zalando with Agentic Support

Ola Wahab — Zalando

Feature engineering at scale has traditionally been a high-friction process — days of infra setup, complex tooling coordination, and lots of boilerplate. Ola will walk through how Zalando is shifting to a low-code, configuration-driven approach where teams define pipelines declaratively, and how agentic coding has compressed the journey from feature discovery to production from weeks to days.

18:40 – Ranking Logic Migration from Monolith — Using Code Agents for Iterative Performance Benchmarking

Ivan Potapov — Zalando

How Zalando’s Search and Browse Discovery team extracted a latency-critical ranking service from a monolith and validated it for production.

This talk covers:

• Migrating the ranking read path into a standalone Ranking API
• Using AI-powered agentic loops with async-profiler to close the p99 latency gap
• Practical lessons on allocation profiling, virtual threads, and production validation

Format: 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A

19:00 – Coding Agents for ML Pipelines & AI Systems (Hopsworks + Claude Code)

Jim Dowling — Hopsworks

Coding agents are rapidly reshaping software and ML engineering. This talk explores how prompt-driven development is changing how we build ML systems.

We’ll cover:

• ML problem decomposition and architecture optimization in an agent-driven world
• Data-driven experimentation workflows
• Building faster and higher-quality systems with Claude Code
• Why building on top of AI infrastructure boosts productivity

Based on Jim’s O’Reilly book: Building AI Systems with a Feature Store

Format: 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A

19:20 – Panel Discussion

Product Mindset in Engineering — The Evolution of the AI Engineer Role

Jim Dowling — CEO, Hopsworks

Leela Sharma — Director of Engineering, Zalando

Florian Hönicke — Principal AI Engineer, Elastic

Alexey Grigorev — Founder, DataTalks.Club

A discussion on how GenAI is reshaping engineering roles, expectations, and the shift toward product-oriented thinking.

20:00 – Pizza, Drinks & Networking

Wrap up the evening with food, drinks, and conversations with fellow engineers and speakers.

Invite your friends and join us for an evening of learning and networking!