Biotech Meetups Berlin

Sunday Tech Coffee Meetup

Welcome to Sunday Tech Coffee. This is a **networking** event for those in the tech industry in Berlin. We are usually inside and to the right. Ask the barista/bartender if you can't find us.

Lessons from the Field: Scale, Availability, and Performance

**[IMPORTANT NOTICE registration is HERE](https://luma.com/wh28yfqv)** ​**Please bring a valid ID (driving licence or passport) with you on the day, as it will be required for entry to the venue.** Join **Aerospike** **AWS, Adjust and Miro** for an evening of technical talks focused on the challenges of running real-time, business-critical systems at scale. Hear firsthand lessons from engineers managing large datasets, database migrations, and cloud infrastructure availability in production. From Miro's Redis-to-Aerospike migration on Kubernetes to AWS best practices for capacity planning and resilience, speakers will share practical insights gained from operating demanding workloads where performance and reliability matter. ​Connect with fellow engineers, architects, and technology leaders from Berlin's tech community over drinks and networking. ​ ​**Agenda** **17:30 – 18:00 - Welcome & networking** **18:00-18:10 - Speed vs Capacity: Designing Data Systems for Real-Time Scale** *Dirk Möller, Regional Lead Germany and EE, Aerospike* In high-performance data systems, balancing RAM and disk is key to real-time performance at scale. This session explores the technical nuances of database architecture in today’s AI-driven era, where workloads demand low latency, massive scale, and adaptive infrastructure. Drawing on real-world, mission-critical systems, we’ll show how to achieve the right mix of speed, scale, cost-efficiency, and reliability - designing architectures that meet today’s real-time demands while staying sustainable and affordable. **18:10 – 18:30 - Scaling Beyond Millions of Transactions** *​Leonardo Muñoz, Platform Engineer, Adjust* A behind-the-scenes look at how Adjust powers high-throughput, low-latency workloads at scale using a distributed database platform running on bare metal infrastructure. Leonardo will explore the architectural and operational decisions behind the deployment, the challenges of managing dedicated hardware at scale, and the lessons learned from years of production experience supporting mission-critical workloads. **18:30 – 18:50 - Pod Ready ≠ Data Safe: Migrating a Critical Dataset on Kubernetes** *Yuriy Chernikov, Staff Software Engineer, Miro* ​ Miro migrated one of its most critical datasets from a legacy caching platform to a modern distributed database running on Kubernetes - and not everything went according to plan. This practical talk covers what the migration actually required, the design decisions that made failures survivable, and the operational lessons that only emerge when managing datasets measured in terabytes. **18:50-19:10 - Managing Amazon EC2 Capacity and Availability** *Nati Cohen, Sr. Specialist Solutions Architect, Compute, AWS* ​ Modern data-intensive applications require infrastructure that delivers high performance, scalability, and resilience. Organizations often seek to leverage the latest storage-optimized EC2 instances, select larger instance sizes for improved performance, place infrastructure close to data producers and consumers, and scale efficiently as business demands grow. In this session, we'll explore how to balance these performance requirements with cost optimization and capacity availability. We'll review the various EC2 capacity and reservation models, including Capacity Reservations, On-Demand Instances, Savings Plans, and more. Learn how to combine these options to optimize cost, performance, and availability for large-scale production workloads **19:00-20:00- Networking** **[IMPORTANT NOTICE registration is HERE](https://luma.com/wh28yfqv)**

Square Tomatoes and Robot Bees - Who decides?

You don't have to sign up-just stop by. Tea, coffee, water, beer, wine, and pizza will be available throughout the evening. --- -- Most conversations about AI skip the part that is crucial: **who it's built for, who pays for it, and who doesn't get a say**. ​This evening goes exactly there. ​We start in 1960s California, where scientists bred a new kind of tomato: square, hard, machine-ready, and wiped out 82% of the state's tomato farms in the process. Farmworkers and small farmers sued the university behind the technology, arguing they were being forced to fund their own replacement. They lost. But the questions they raised never went away. Today, researchers are using AI, robotics and gene editing to create tomatoes that can be pollinated by robots, crops designed for automated production systems, and even new traits engineered for consumer preferences. AI is having an impact on agriculture, food production, and labour, often with public money, rarely with public input. Sounds familiar? ​**What to expect** ​A 90-minute interactive evening: * ​**Opening talk** connecting the tomato harvester story to today's AI developments * ​**Live audience polling** * ​Conversation with **Ildi Carlisle-Cummins** (California Institute for Rural Studies): storyteller, oral historian, and director of the Cal Ag Roots project, one of the organisations that grew out of the original lawsuit * ​Open audience **discussion** * ​**Informal networking** to close ​**What you'll take away** ​A sharper way to think about who controls the technologies influencing our food, our work, and our world, and what citizens can actually do when change feels inevitable. If the phrase "square tomato" sounds too strange to be true, you're not alone. Even the TV detective [Mr. Monk couldn't believe his eyes](https://youtu.be/VtO-97pl7cA?is=VnMxtacAwL1IChub)! **​Free to attend, free of jargon, no expertise required.** **Just bring your curiosity.** ​*Hosted by [Save Our Seeds](http://www.saveourseeds.org/?utm_source=luma) and [Human-Future-Hub](https://humanfuturehub.org/?utm_source=luma) Berlin* Tea, coffee, water, beer, wine, and pizza will be available throughout the evening.

AWS Women's User Group Berlin: June Event - AI Agents in Production

**The AWS Women’s User Group Berlin** is thrilled to invite you to our upcoming meetup sponsored by Storm Reply focused on **Building production-ready AI agents for real-world impact.** Join us for a deep dive into how to build, observe, and evaluate AI agents at scale. You’ll also see how these ideas come to life in a real-world climate-smart agriculture solution that turns weather forecasts into actionable field guidance. Whether you’re building agentic systems today or planning what comes next, this meetup will give you practical insights into making AI agents work in production. **Speaker Info** **Keynote Talk** **Speaker:** Tetiana Senna **Position:** Team Lead / Senior Project Manager, Storm Reply **Talk Title:** Trust, but Verify: Observability and Evaluations for AWS Agents **Abstract:** Getting an AI agent to work in a demo is easy. Knowing whether it still works in production - after the next prompt change, the next model upgrade, the next edge case - is the hard part. Unit tests don't cover non-deterministic behavior, and manually reviewing a handful of runs doesn't scale. This talk walks through the two practices that close that gap: observability (understanding what actually happened inside your agent) and evaluation (deciding whether the outcome was any good). We'll dig into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore's Observability and Evaluations capabilities, compare the proven evaluation approaches - built-in LLM-as-a-Judge evaluators for automatic quality monitoring, and custom evaluators for business-specific correctness checks - with a candid look at what each one is good for, where it falls short, and what it costs to run at scale. We'll also take a close look at AgentCore Optimization, AWS's newly previewed feature in this space. **Applied Agentic AI Talk** **Speaker:** Vidhu Mitra Malladi **Position:** Senior Software Engineer, Yara Digital Farming **Talk Title:** Weather Risk Intelligence Agent for farmers & Agronomist Abstract: Unpredictable weather events — heavy rainfall, drought, frost, and heatwaves pose significant risk to crop yield and fertilizer efficiency. While forecast data is widely available, it is rarely translated into timely; field-level guidance farmers can act upon. Using AWS AgentCore framework and AI capabilities, we can turn weather predictions into clear agronomic actions, supporting climate-smart agriculture at scale. **You'l learn:** * Implementation of the solution using AWS Agent Core framework * Architecture of the project. 🗓️ **Event Details:** \- Date: Tuesday\, June 30th \- Venue: Storm Reply GmbH\, [address](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Storm+Reply+GmbH/@52.5012692,13.368852,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x47a851119af460c5:0x35e34ba578e8b1ec!8m2!3d52.5012692!4d13.368852!16s%2Fg%2F11gg9298pv?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUxNy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D) \- Time: 06:00 PM \- 9:00 PM Doors open at 6:00 PM Food & drinks will be provided. 📋 **Program Schedule:** **18:00** \- Registration and Welcome Networking **18:20** \- AWS Women's User Group Welcome **18:30** \- "Trust\, but Verify: Observability and Evaluations for AWS Agents" **Speaker:** Tetiana Senna, Team Lead / Senior Project Manager, Storm Reply A practical session for anyone working with AI agents on AWS who wants the confidence to put them in front of real users. You'll leave with a clear framework for monitoring agents in production and a concrete approach to evaluating their behavior over time. **19:15 - 19:30** Break **19:30** \- "Weather Risk Intelligence Agent for farmers & Agronomist" **Speaker:** Vidhu Mitra Malladi, Senior Software Engineer, Yara Digital Farming Discover how AI agents can transform weather forecasts into actionable, field-level farming guidance. **20:10** \- Q&A and closing remarks **20:15 - 21:00** Networking, food & drinks 🎟️ **RSVP** Don't miss this excellent opportunity to connect with Tetiana, Vidhu, the AWS WUG Team and a thriving community of cloud enthusiasts and professionals. Secure your spot by RSVPing now! Seats are limited! Please note that this user group is specifically for WOMEN and FLINTA\* (female, lesbian, inter, trans\*, non-binary, and agender) only. Please also check out the AWS User Group Berlin. \*\*\*\*\*\* 🚨Attention🚨 This meetup is hosted at Storm Reply GmbH and attendees must be registered to go through building security. Make sure you bring an ID card with you, and you register the event with a valid name that matches to your ID. Media and Consent: We inform all attendees that photographs and videos will be taken during the meetup and will only be used by the event organizers for documentation and promotional purposes. By RSVPing to this event you are consenting to our media policy. Please let the organizers know if you do not want to be in the pictures/videos. Thank you very much for your cooperation! \*\* The AWS Women’s User Group is the very first official women-centric AWS User Group in DACH and EMEA. This group serves as a secure and supportive platform for women who want to share their AWS knowledge, passion for cloud computing and advance their career through targeted learning opportunities. We extend a warm invitation to FLINTA individuals who are interested in being part of our User Group. Code of Conduct: At the AWS Women's User Group in Berlin, we have a strong and unequivocal code of conduct in place to create a safe and empowering environment for all.

Echte Männerfreundschaften - Treffpunkt

"Quality is NOW" – Networking Around Quality Engineering

Hello everyone! The German Testing Board (GTB), together with our partners IREB, iSAQB, and the Einstein Center Digital Future, warmly invites you to **“Quality is NOW – Networking Around Quality Engineering”** in Berlin. Join us for an inspiring evening of networking, engaging discussions, and new connections. Following short talks from the worlds of Requirements Engineering, Software Architecture, and Quality Engineering, we will explore the question: **How is AI changing the world of software development?** During a World Café session and informal networking afterwards, we'll tackle the questions everyone is asking right now: \- What's your biggest pain point when using AI? \- Has AI improved or compromised quality in your projects? \- Which skills do teams and leaders need to succeed with AI? \- And where should we focus our efforts next? Join the conversation, exchange experiences, and discover how others are navigating the opportunities and challenges of AI-driven software development. **What to expect** * **Inspiring insights:** Gain practical tips and fresh perspectives for your career in Quality Engineering. * **Meaningful connections:** Meet developers and quality engineering professionals who share your passion. * **A relaxed atmosphere:** Enjoy drinks, delicious food, and great conversations in an inspiring setting. 📅 **When?** 8 July 2026 – Doors open at 5:30 PM (Event: 6:00 PM–9:00 PM) 📍 **Where?** Einstein Center Digital Future, Wilhelmstraße 67, 10117 Berlin 🎟 **Free admission** – Please register We look forward to seeing you there! **Your “Quality is NOW” Team**

Agentic AI in the Wild: What Actually Runs in Production

AI agents are moving into production. The question is no longer whether to use them, but what it actually takes to make them work once the demo is over. This WeAreDevelopers PreDay meetup is for builders, founders, and practitioners wiring AI agents into real codebases, CI/CD pipelines, developer platforms, and knowledge systems. The evening focuses on the honest conversations that rarely fit into a conference talk: what breaks at scale, what context engineering really looks like, and where the failure modes hide. The theme is connected intelligence: how graph-based reasoning, smarter pipelines, and agentic code review are changing production AI systems, and what engineering teams need to do differently to support them. We will explore constraint satisfaction in agent decision-making, agentic AI in production, AI-powered development workflows, and Java’s role in the future of AI systems. No vendor pitches. Just the stuff that runs in production. Agenda 17:00 — Doors Open, Drinks and Networking 17:30 — Welcome and Opening Remarks 17:45 — Andreas Kollegger, Director of GenAI, Neo4j 18:10 — Break, Food and Networking 18:35 — Panel Discussion: Agentic AI in the Wild 19:20 — Tech Talk 2: CircleCI 19:45 — Ana Maria Mihalceanu, Java Champion Alumni and Developer Advocate, Oracle 20:25 — Closing Remarks Speakers and Sessions Andreas Kollegger, Director of GenAI, Neo4j Talk: Where is the Zebra? Agent Decision-making as Constraint Satisfaction Zebra Puzzles are a useful lens for understanding agentic reasoning. They require no domain knowledge, only structured constraint satisfaction. Real-world decisions, however, are messier: loan approvals, resource allocation, compliance, and approval routing often combine hard rules, soft rules, and human discretion. This session examines how different architectures approach structured decision-making and why recognizing constraint satisfaction problems changes how you build agents. You will learn how constraint networks, LLMs, and hybrid systems solve logical problems differently, how enterprise decisions often hide “Zebra Puzzles” beneath complexity, and when your agent needs search, inference, generation, or a hybrid approach. Ana Maria Mihalceanu, Java Champion Alumni and Developer Advocate, Oracle Talk: Now and Next Java for AI Tired of treating AI as a black-box REST endpoint? With JDK 25 and the Foreign Function and Memory API, Java developers can wire real models directly to native runtimes such as ONNX for fast CPU/GPU inference. This talk shows how to map tensor buffers to Java MemorySegment, switch execution providers, and build self-contained Java applications for inference. It also looks ahead to Project Babylon’s code reflection, where model logic can be expressed as Java code that can be analyzed and lowered to accelerator backends, reducing the need for external model files or glue languages. Build expressive and testable FFM-based inference today, and author pure Java AI-ready models tomorrow. CircleCI Speaker Details TBC Panel: Agentic AI in the Wild What does it take to move AI agents from proof of concept into systems that run reliably? This panel brings together practitioners from across the stack to discuss context management, failure modes, governance, production workflows, and what changes when agentic systems scale. Expect specific lessons, not talking points. Moderator Dana Fine — Open Source and Community Manager, Qodo Dana leads open-source programs and community at Qodo. She runs the GitHub User Group, CNCF local and GenAI communities, organizes the Bond AI meetup series, and has built developer communities across the cloud native and open source ecosystem for years. Panelists Nnenna Ndukwe — Developer Relations Lead, Qodo Nnenna leads Developer Relations at Qodo, the AI code review platform. She is a software developer, applied AI researcher, and community builder with over a decade of experience across med-tech, fintech, and media-tech. A 2019 Google Women Techmakers Scholar, she focuses on integrating AI code review into modern development workflows for open source and enterprise teams at scale. Sebastian Kister Sebastian is a cloud pioneer and enterprise transformation practitioner known for implementing production-ready architecture for Agentic AI Operations in a large enterprise environment. An active CNCF and Linux Foundation member, he advocates for scalable platform ecosystems and a people-first approach: people first, then tools, then processes.

Quality Engineering meetup

*Join us for a Meetup on Quality Engineering at Deutsche Bank Berlin Technology Centre!* *We’re bringing you three deep-dive talks: all designed to challenge the way you think about quality, testing, and collaboration.* *As always, expect great conversations, snacks, and drinks. See you there!* **AGENDA** **1\. Olga Bokova @ Deutsche Bank: *Testing the Nanoseconds: A Decade of High-Frequency Trading QA Evolution*** High-frequency trading systems operate at the edge of technology, where latency is measured in nanoseconds and every delay can translate directly into financial impact. In this environment, traditional QA approaches quickly break down, e.g. functional correctness alone is no longer enough. In this talk, Olga will share a real-world journey of how QA evolved over the past decade within high-performance trading systems. We’ll explore the challenges of testing ultra-low latency platforms, handling massive market data streams, and ensuring deterministic behaviour in highly distributed environments. Olga will walk us through how fragmented testing approaches led to inefficiency, duplication, and scalability issues, and how they transitioned toward a unified, domain-level testing framework built around simulation and controlled environments. You’ll learn how treating testing infrastructure as an engineering product helped us reduce complexity, increase reliability, and enable performance testing at realistic market scale. Along the way, Olga will share practical lessons, trade-offs, and what they chose to abandon (not just what we built). **2\. Neha\-B Yadav @ Deutsche Bank: *Secure AI, Smarter Testing: How QA Teams Can Shift Left Efficiently*** Now as ever, staying effective and efficient requires more than just strong testing fundamentals, but also intelligent orchestration of tools, data, and automation. Neha will focus in this talk on three key dimensions: how to stay effective with the help of AI-driven test workflows, how to remain relevant with modern engineering practices and enterprise tooling, and how to continuously upskill in an ecosystem of automation, AI agents, and integrated test platforms. Neha will share her approach with shifting testing left, proactive defect prevention, early test design, and proper continuous integration. The session will highlight techniques such as test-driven development, early collaboration between QA and engineering, and integrating validation into CI/CD pipelines to reduce downstream risks. **3\. Vitaly Sharovatov @ Qase: Leading Cost Cutting Initiatives by Improving Quality** More and more companies are cutting costs and doing layoffs, and QA is often among the first to be cut. Yet it is precisely QA folks who can help cut costs while improving quality. In this talk, Vitaly suggests ways we all can lead cost cutting discussions to make things right and either reduce or prevent layoffs. Partner with Customer Support to identify which escaped defects cost the most in ticket handling and escalations. Partner with Sales to identify which bugs put renewals and expansions at risk. Add Finance for SLA credits and refunds, and Engineering for incident response and hotfix effort. Add it all up, and you get external failure costs. After that, quantify internal failure costs like rework, retesting, queues, and waste. We will turn these numbers into a cost cutting proposal that managers understand: reduce the priciest external failure costs first, then reduce internal failure costs, by improving the way we build quality in. You will leave with a simple template for collecting the numbers with other departments, doing the calculations, and proposing specific process changes. Let's be the people who cut failure costs, not the people who get cut!

Designing Spring Modulith Applications with Dmitry Chuyko and Alexei Zinoviev

And the new, right-before-holidays, edition of our meetup! **JetBrains** as a company deeply invested into Java and Spring ecosystem, is hosting us! **Alexei Zinoviev — Software Developer** at JetBrains TBD **Dmitry Chuyko - Architect** at Bellsoft Talk title: **From Kitchen to Table: A Safe Software Journey with SBOMs** Description: With the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) making SBOMs a legal necessity for getting software to market, managing your software supply chain is no longer optional - it’s mandatory. Think of your containerized Java (and Spring) application as a complex dish served to production. Your software supply chain is a kitchen. Would you trust a kitchen with hidden ingredients? SBOMs are the ingredient manifests that health inspectors (scanners) and regulators (compliance) demand. This practical talk addresses the real-world problems Java and DevOps teams face: enforcing policies at CI/CD stations (GitLab/GHA), verifying manifests for pre-packaged meals (hardened containers), and passing Kubernetes health inspections (OPA/Ratify). We’ll cut through the complexity of competing formats (SPDX/CycloneDX), registry storage quirks, and toolchain integration, showing how SBOMs become actionable security artifacts, not just paperwork. Learn to build a supply chain where every component is traceable, every vulnerability is blockable, and every deployment is compliant. Schedule: **18:00** Opening doors **18:30** Talk by Alexei **19:00** Networking **19:30** Talk by Dmitry **20:30** Networking

BLN DevOps #53 | Parloa

Join us for the **Berlin DevOps Summer Meetup**: our last edition before the summer break! We're excited to be hosted by **Parloa** for an evening of interesting talks, discussions, and networking. There will be food and drinks provided, and plenty of time to connect with fellow DevOps enthusiasts. **📌 Please register at least 24 hours before the event.** We need to share the attendee list with the Parloa office in advance, and **spots are limited**. \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- **Agenda** 18:30 Open Doors, Networking with Food and Drinks 19:00 Welcome words by Parloa and BLN DevOps team 19:25 **Running K8s with AI: Automating** **the SRE Lifecycle with Grafana MCP and GitLab** 19:50 **The Pipeline Was Green — AI Agents and CI Trust** 20:15 Short Break 20:30 **Managing Uninvited Guests: Securing Open Source Dependencies** 20:55 Networking 21:30 Closing ➡️ Interested in hosting an event? Fill out our [Call for Hosts](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScBpga8Yp-QAQt2lGskZWOThaKyQ_MbMbZaNcklgeXxqr5Vrg/viewform?usp=sf_link) and let's set up a meeting. \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- *Christoph Ebeling* **Running K8s with AI: Automating** **the SRE Lifecycle with Grafana MCP and GitLab** What does it look like to run 30+ microservices, 8 databases, and a Kafka cluster almost entirely through AI agents? This talk walks through a practical demo of automating the full SRE lifecycle: from incident investigation to deployment validation, using Grafana MCP and the GitLab Agent Platform, and where humans still need to stay in the loop. *Serhii Vasylenko* **The Pipeline Was Green — AI Agents and CI Trust** We’ve spent years building CI/CD pipelines that tell us when code is "technically correct," but are they capable of telling an autonomous AI agent if a change is safe to apply? This talk explores a real-world incident where an AI-powered automation -- pairing Renovate with Claude Code -- successfully executed a "green" pipeline that broke a critical QA cluster for three days, how the team reacted, and how we evolved our vision toward the future of human-agentic collaboration with code. *Frithjof Hoffmann* **Managing Uninvited Guests: Securing Open Source Dependencies** Open source software is the ultimate neighborhood party, but what happens when an uninvited guest slips through the door? This talk digs into the messy reality of dependency hell and its role in software supply chain security: from typosquatting attacks to maintainer account takeovers, and the abandoned projects with known CVEs quietly living in your codebase rent-free.

July Meetup: Hearables and assistive technologies

On the 1st of July we will host the next iteration of our monthly Audio Developer Meetup where **Peggy Sylopp** from [sinceare](https://www.sinceare.com/) will be presenting her work on personalization approaches for hearables, and **Vlad Litvinenko** will demo 'Spotykach', a looping playground. See below for details! As always, there will be a chance to network over drinks and pizza. Anyone interested in Audio development is welcome! Doors open at 18:00, talks start at 18:15. Please note: Attendance is **strictly limited** to people who have RSVP'd. Talk details: **Can users train their own audio system?** \- Peggy Sylopp In this talk, we present Sinceare’s closed-loop personalization approach for hearables. Instead of relying on predefined fitting rules or static presets, users teach the system how it should sound through interaction and feedback. These preferences are transformed into personalized machine-learning models that learn how to control existing audio processing algorithms according to individual preferences. Rather than replacing audio DSP algorithms, the generated models act as an adaptive control layer that continuously adjusts algorithm parameters based on user-specific listening preferences. Based on more than eight years of research and a recent study conducted with Fraunhofer IDMT and Charité, we will share insights into user-driven audio model generation, human-in-the-loop machine learning, and the path from research prototype to future embedded hearable deployment. **Spotykach, a looping playground** \- Vlad Litvinenko Vlad is a Berlin based software developer doing e-commerce by day, bleeping machines at night and sometimes music in between. The talk is about device they’ve recently built. It’s “Spotykach”, a looping playground, as they call it. It started from an attempt to do a simple Beat-Repeat kind of plugin, but then evolved into a community project within Synthux Academy with people from different backgrounds and countries.

Quality Engineering meetup #13

**PLEASE NOTE THE ADDRESS CHANGE! We're now at DEUTSCHE BANK BERLIN!** *In collaboration with* *Deutsche Bank*, *[Qase](https://qase.io) is presenting the **thirteenth** Meetup on Quality Engineering in Berlin.* *We’re bringing you three deep-dive talks: all designed to challenge the way you think about quality, testing, and collaboration.* *As always, expect great conversations, snacks, and drinks. See you there!* **AGENDA** **1\. Olga Bokova @ Deutsche Bank:** ***Testing the Nanoseconds: A Decade of High-Frequency Trading QA Evolution*** High-frequency trading systems operate at the edge of technology, where latency is measured in nanoseconds and every delay can translate directly into financial impact. In this environment, traditional QA approaches quickly break down, e.g. functional correctness alone is no longer enough. In this talk, Olga will share a real-world journey of how QA evolved over the past decade within high-performance trading systems. We’ll explore the challenges of testing ultra-low latency platforms, handling massive market data streams, and ensuring deterministic behaviour in highly distributed environments. Olga will walk us through how fragmented testing approaches led to inefficiency, duplication, and scalability issues, and how they transitioned toward a unified, domain-level testing framework built around simulation and controlled environments. You’ll learn how treating testing infrastructure as an engineering product helped us reduce complexity, increase reliability, and enable performance testing at realistic market scale. Along the way, Olga will share practical lessons, trade-offs, and what they chose to abandon (not just what we built). **2\. Neha\-B Yadav @ Deutsche Bank: *Secure AI, Smarter Testing: How QA Teams Can Shift Left Efficiently*** Now as ever, staying effective and efficient requires more than just strong testing fundamentals, but also intelligent orchestration of tools, data, and automation. Neha will focus in this talk on three key dimensions: how to stay effective with the help of AI-driven test workflows, how to remain relevant with modern engineering practices and enterprise tooling, and how to continuously upskill in an ecosystem of automation, AI agents, and integrated test platforms. Neha will share her approach with shifting testing left, proactive defect prevention, early test design, and proper continuous integration. The session will highlight techniques such as test-driven development, early collaboration between QA and engineering, and integrating validation into CI/CD pipelines to reduce downstream risks. **3\. Vitaly Sharovatov @ Qase: Leading Cost\-Cutting Initiatives by Improving Quality** More and more companies are cutting costs and doing layoffs, and QA is often among the first to be cut. Yet it is precisely QA folks who can help cut costs while improving quality. In this talk, Vitaly suggests ways we all can lead cost cutting discussions to make things right and either reduce or prevent layoffs. Partner with Customer Support to identify which escaped defects cost the most in ticket handling and escalations. Partner with Sales to identify which bugs put renewals and expansions at risk. Add Finance for SLA credits and refunds, and Engineering for incident response and hotfix effort. Add it all up, and you get external failure costs. After that, quantify internal failure costs like rework, retesting, queues, and waste. We will turn these numbers into a cost cutting proposal that managers understand: reduce the priciest external failure costs first, then reduce internal failure costs, by improving the way we build quality in. You will leave with a simple template for collecting the numbers with other departments, doing the calculations, and proposing specific process changes. Let's be the people who cut failure costs, not the people who get cut!