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From BERT to Agents: Building Production AI at Booking.com After seven years building ML systems that serve millions of travelers, Georgios Chouliaras has watched the field transform from hand-coded chatbot rules to autonomous agents—and he's learned which shiny new approaches actually work in production. Georgios Chouliaras, Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Booking.com, joins me to share...

What happens when you throw out traditional team structures and rebuild them around missions instead of functions? Jan Hegewald, VP of Engineering at Taxdoo and former engineering leader at Zalando and SumUp, shares how he dissolved static component teams in favor of flexible, outcome-focused "mission teams" that reformed every quarter around specific goals. The experiment worked brillia...

⁠In this episode, I sit down with Roman, CTO of Breakfast, a social tech startup fostering offline human connections in Lisbon.⁠ Roman brings over a decade of tech experience, having navigated the trenches from Rails engineer to engineering manager at companies like Loca (later acquired by Capgemini) and Grammarly, before taking the helm as CTO at an early-stage startup. What We Cover The Consulti...

Iwan Gulenk, founder of a Swiss tech recruitment agency, maps the new reality of tech hiring What’s inside: 1) Market reset and hiring rigor: After years of growth peaking in 2021, 2024 hammered agencies and slowed decisions. Inbound has exploded (think LinkedIn Easy Apply), time-to-fill is unpredictable, and exact-match hiring dominates. Iwan’s “life partner” analogy underscores the variability a...

Giuseppe Birardi is CTO of Orma Lab, an Italian consultancy focused on R&D and industrial AI. A former researcher turned PM and developer, he also co-organizes the Python Bar community. What we cover: - The geometry of meaning: Embeddings turn words into vectors with direction and magnitude, allowing context to “pull” meanings (money-bank vs. river-bank). Dimensionality reduction compresses co...

Csaba Mézes , former delivery manager at Nordcloud with 25 years in the industry, shares his hard-earned insights on software delivery, team management, and why most projects fail. Here's what you'll learn from this episode: 1/ 🎯 Scope flexibility is your secret weapon . Unlike physical construction where you might hit bedrock requiring special tools, software development has no immovable...

Duarte O.Carmo, machine learning consultant based in Copenhagen, shares his honest take on AI tools, local models, and the reality behind the hype. Here's what you'll learn from this episode: 1/ 🎯 Don't throw LLMs at every problem. Duarte explains why binary classification problems don't need ChatGPT when logistic regression works better. Learn his framework for choosing the right...

Ellen König, Head of Engineering at Alcemy, shares her practical insights on engineering leadership, remote team management, and building sustainable tech companies. Here's what you'll learn from this episode: 1/ 📚 Most tech leadership books are actually marketing in disguise. Ellen reveals why books from consulting companies give you just enough information to understand concepts but not...

Anastasiia , former Head of Engineering at Native Instruments, shares her practical insights on engineering leadership, team building, and quality-driven development. Here's what you'll learn from this episode: 1/ 🔍 Discover what truly matters when hiring engineers. Anastasiia reveals why soft skills often outweigh technical expertise and how to identify candidates who will strengthen you...