CONFERENCE DAY TWO
Day 2 Sessions
8:30 am - 9:30 am
Registration & Coffee
9:15 am - 9:30 am
Opening Chair Notes
Session Available For Sponsorship
9:00 am - 9:30 am
Opening Panel: Scaling the Platform Journey: From Tool Providers to Experience Orchestrators
Maj-Britt Christensen -
Director of Platform Engineering,
IKEA
As engineering organisations mature, traditional Platform as a Service and ticket driven support models often become a scaling bottleneck rather than an enabler. This panel brings together platform leaders who've successfully transitioned from reactive tool providers to product led experience orchestrators, focusing on seamless internal developer journeys while supporting increasingly complex architectures.
• Moving from service based platforms to product led internal developer experiences
• Designing scalable platform architectures without sacrificing usability or adoption
• Embedding product mindedness as the core principle of modern platform teams
9:30 am - 10:00 am
Presentation: Leading with Clarity: Using Team Structure and Data to Predict and Power Tool Adoption
Ionel Condor -
Director of Engineering,
RWS
When engineering teams grow and diversify, choosing the right tools becomes a leadership challenge, not just a technical one. In this session, Ionel Condor shares how his approach and deep expertise to team structure, long term stability and people first management helps him anticipate which tools will resonate with developers. Drawing on his experience overseeing teams of more than twenty people, unifying different security approaches and relying on real world data from surveys and AI tool usage, Ionel shows how smart leadership accelerates adoption and cuts through noise.
• Spotting the tools developers actually want through survey insights, productivity signals and usage patterns across the organisation
• Designing team structures that reveal friction points early and make it easier to understand what engineers need to thrive
• Winning developer buy in by presenting clear, evidence driven cases rather than relying on directives or assumptions
10:00 am - 10:30 am
Presentation: Organising Teams That Enable Platform Democratisation at Scale
Carlos Costa -
Global Director of Data & AI Foundations,
Adidas
As platforms grow across data, cloud and AI foundations, democratising access depends on how teams are organised as much as the technology they build. In this session, Carlos Costa shares his insights on how organizations can structure their engineering teams to spread capability, reduce dependency on central bottlenecks and ensure every developer can adopt the platform confidently, even as complexity and security demands increase.
• Structuring platform, data and AI teams so responsibilities are clear, contributions are shared and internal users always have a path to support without central slow downs
• Enabling developers through leadership practices that align team goals, clarify ownership boundaries and create predictable routes for onboarding, training and collaboration
• Democratising platform adoption by shaping team interactions, feedback loops and workflow design so open source frameworks and shared pipelines are easy for any engineer to consume and contribute
10:00 am - 10:30 am
Morning Coffee Break
10:30 am - 11:00 am
Presentation: Powering Nationwide's Cloud Future: How a Unified Multi Cloud Platform Accelerates Delivery
David Turner -
CICD Platform Engineering Lead,
Nationwide Building Society
Nationwide Building Society is modernising its CI/CD platform to operate seamlessly across AWS, Azure and key SaaS services, enabling more consistent delivery and creating a clearer, more connected engineering ecosystem. David Turner shares how the platform team is centralising Kubernetes based workflows, strengthening security, improving connectivity across hybrid environments to deliver change faster and more reliably. The initiative demonstrates how aligning tooling, platforms and cloud strategy is helping Nationwide move toward a more unified, scalable and secure multi cloud future.
• Unifying multi cloud delivery through a centralised, consistent CI/CD platform
• Simplifying engineering workflows with improved connectivity and shared Kubernetes patterns
• Strengthening platform resilience through modern container practices and enhanced cloud security
11:00 am - 11:30 am
Panel Discussion: How Can DevOps and CloudOps Keep Engineers in a Flow State?
Rick Clegg -
Developer Experience Lead,
Wise
As organisations scale, operational workflows often become fragmented, overly complex and burdened with tools that interrupt developer flow. This panel brings together engineering, DevOps and CloudOps leaders to discuss how usability principles can transform pipelines, environments and on call processes into streamlined, intuitive experiences, providing candid insights into eliminating operational friction and designing workflows that support both speed and stability.
• Streamlining CI/CD, provisioning and cloud management workflows to minimise cognitive load
• Unifying operational tooling so engineers aren't forced to navigate inconsistent interfaces
• Enhancing usability in incident response and on call processes to reduce errors and operational drag
Rick Clegg, Head of Developer Experience at Wise
11:30 am - 12:00 pm
Presentation: CERES Data Platform: Engineering the Platform That Lets Developers Build Without Friction
Elcio Abrahao -
Platform Director,
Syngenta
As digital products expand and engineering teams scale, the real challenge for platform teams is making it genuinely useful for the developers who rely on it. CERES Data Platform is a new platform initiative designed to bring tools, workflows, and capabilities into a single environment where teams can integrate features more easily and spend less time navigating complexity. With automation, scalable architecture, and AI-assisted development at its core, the platform is being built to remove friction and create a smoother path from idea to delivery for the teams building on top of it. Elcio Abrahao is leading the development of a platform that supports engineering teams across a global digital division, shaping an environment where developers can be more efficient.
• Designing internal platforms that simplify how developers interact with tools and infrastructure
• Reducing friction by creating environments where platform capabilities integrate naturally
• Exploring how AI-assisted workflows can support developers building on modern platforms
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Lunch
1:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Presentation: From Chaos to Clarity: How Evri Built a Developer Experience Team that Scales
Louis Jones -
Lead DevEx Engineer,
Evri
Years ago Evri's engineering landscape hit a tipping point with tech debt, fragmented pipelines and uneven quality and so a dedicated Developer Experience function was formed to standardise workflows, centralise critical tooling and cut cognitive load across 40 squads and 400 developers. Louis Jones is at the forefront of this transformation, to convert scattered practices into consistent delivery habits that actually feel better for developers and the business.
• Standardising pipelines and practices to reduce cognitive load and uplift code quality at scale
• Centralising tooling without stifling teams by pairing shared libraries with clear guardrails and opt in enablement
• Inspiring culture shifts through developer first communication, visible safety wins and metrics that reflect real work
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Panel Discussion: Fixing Usability Gaps Before They Become Tech Debt
Joachim Karlsson -
Head of Developer Experience,
SEB
James Hattersly-Dykes - Principal Engineer, Evri
David Turner - CICD Platform Engineering Lead, Nationwide Building Society
When usability breaks down, developers create shadow tooling, ignore guardrails and build their own paths which is leaving organisations with fragmented systems and more risk. This discussion unpacks why developers avoid the "official way," what usability failures look like in the real world, and how leaders rebuild trust through clarity, speed and better design.
• Identifying the usability pain points that push engineers toward alternatives
• Rebuilding platform flows around speed, transparency and discoverability
• Collaborating with developers to co design features and prevent tool divergence
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Presentation: Beyond Uptime: Redesigning Infrastructure Teams Around Product Thinking, Usability and AI Driven Change
Stephane Di Cesare -
Senior Platform Engineer, SOP Experience,
DKB | Deutsche Kreditbank AG
Infrastructure teams were traditionally measured on reliability but as developers become their customers and AI reshapes expectations, teams need a radical shift in how they design, deliver and evolve platforms. In this session, Stéphane Di Cesare, with a decade of expertise, unpacks what it really takes to transform an infrastructure function into DKG, a product driven organisation and one that prioritises usability, tackles documentation debt head on and adapts to AI cost pressures.
• Rebuilding infrastructure delivery around product grade discovery practices shadowing engineers, running surveys, validating pain points and eliminating friction at the source
• Taming documentation chaos through structured information architecture and ownership models that give developers clarity without relying on tribal knowledge
• Strategising AI adoption inside infrastructure teams, balancing cost, performance and organisational readiness as developers adopt AI faster than infra can support
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Afternoon Coffee Break
3:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Presentation: Automating at Scale: Building Scalable and Resilient Platforms for Financial Markets
Kaushik Chaubal -
Senior Director,
BlackRock
Automation inside highly regulated financial ecosystems demands more than efficiency; it requires a platform foundation capable of supporting complex workflows, multi-org integrations and uncompromising focus on resilience, scale and performance. Kaushik Chaubal will share his expertise about streamlining workflows, internal and external operating models and interfaces by strengthening engineering practices, aligning with key control groups, and creating a scalable architecture designed for resilience and trust. Elaborating on what it takes to automate safely, operate across multiple institutions and operating models to build platforms robust enough to support mission-critical investment workflows.
• Building resilient platform foundations that safely automate complex, multi organisation workflows
• Aligning engineering and control groups to create secure, compliant automation at scale
• Designing scalable interfaces and operating models that support mission critical investment processes
4:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Panel Discussion: Regulation at Scale: Leading Engineering Teams in Heavily Regulated and International Enterprises
Global enterprises operate under a maze of data laws, compliance mandates and region specific constraints all while trying to innovate at speed. With increasingly strict EU frameworks around PII protection and security shaping architectural decisions, engineering leaders must now design platforms that meet cross border requirements by default.
• Navigating region specific regulations such as EU PII protections while preserving architectural consistency
• Aligning compliance, security and engineering to avoid rework and bottlenecks
• Scaling platforms and processes that remain resilient across diverse legal and regulatory landscapes
4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Presentation: Compliance by Design: Building Platforms That Are Audit Ready, Secure and Built for Trust
As systems become more distributed and AI enabled, enterprises must design platforms that prove their compliance, not just claim it, engineering leaders are now building deeply traceable, fully observable and inherently auditable platforms that withstand scrutiny from regulators, customers and internal audit teams.
• Implementing end to end traceability across every layer of the delivery pipeline
• Automating evidence generation for audits, risk checks and regulatory reporting
• Strengthening platform architecture with controls that prevent, detect and contain breaches
