Engineering Choices You Have to Defend

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Ankur Mattoo, technology leader, architect, and AI practitioner, to discuss why the most successful AI initiatives begin years before generative AI ever reaches production. While helping build the machine learning foundation at Iterable, Ankur faced a challenge common to many fast-growin...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Gautamdev (Gautam) Chowdary, Co-Founder and CTO of Zynix AI, to discuss one of healthcare AI's most difficult engineering challenges: building intelligent systems that work reliably across fragmented healthcare environments. Rather than optimizing for a single electronic medical record (...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend, host Nicola Onassis sits down with Eban Bisong to discuss how AI-native workflows are reshaping software engineering teams and changing what it means to be an engineer. While leading engineering at Part DNA, Eban faced a challenge familiar to many growing organizations: a small team supporting multiple clients, constant co...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend, host Nicola Onassis sits down with Pavel Spesivtsev , CTO, AI strategist, and agentic engineering practitioner, to explore why many AI-driven software initiatives fail long before coding becomes the problem. After spending the last eighteen months helping organizations implement agentic development workflows, Pavel has obs...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Paul Baker to discuss one of the most difficult decisions an engineering leader can make: stopping feature development in order to rebuild the engineering foundation. While working at Capshare, Paul inherited a growing product with strong market traction but a fragile engineering system...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Alex Smirnoff to explore how enterprise AI systems can deliver real business value without replacing the proven infrastructure that already works. At Luminoso, Alex has spent years building large-scale NLP and text analytics systems that help enterprises analyze customer reviews, semanti...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with David Phipps to explore how engineering teams can scale AI-powered retail systems without sacrificing usability, reliability, or operational simplicity. Before joining Generation Tux, David helped build AI-driven digital signage and audience analytics systems that combined computer visio...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Matt Lievertz , VP of Engineering at Cloverleaf, to explore how engineering teams can build AI-powered products that balance personalization, privacy, and enterprise trust. Cloverleaf combines behavioral assessments, workplace communication data, and AI-driven insights to help teams impr...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Lavanya Elangovan to discuss the hidden engineering decisions required to maintain secure, compliant, and scalable healthcare platforms. Lavanya shares how a planned MongoDB upgrade quickly evolved into a full-stack modernization effort involving Ruby on Rails, infrastructure dependencie...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend, host Nicola Onassis sits down with Roy Resh , VP of Engineering at Trax Retail , to explore a pivotal architectural decision that reshaped how large-scale computer vision systems are built and scaled in retail environments. At Trax, Roy and his team built a computer vision platform that analyzes shelf images captured in re...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Keith Deming , an engineering leader with experience at Postmates, Uber, and PRISM Skylabs, to explore a pivotal architectural decision that transformed how computer vision systems scale in the real world. At PRISM Skylabs, Keith and his team built a platform that turned retail surveilla...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Sean Graham , VP of Engineering at Idelic, to unpack a critical shift in how engineering teams approach delivery in high-stakes environments. At Idelic, where software directly impacts fleet safety, compliance, and insurance risk, reliability isn’t optional. Sean shares how their team mo...

Episode Summary: In this episode of Engineering Choices You Have to Defend , host Nicola Onassis sits down with Kevin DiGilio , President of KMD Technology. Kevin explains how compliance frameworks like ITAR, NIST, and DFARS don’t just guide documentation; they dictate core system architecture. When regulations evolved, KMD faced a choice: layer compliance on top of existing software or refactor t...