MLOps Community Podcast

Denny Lee is PM Director, Startups & Ecosystem at Databricks, a longtime Apache Spark, MLflow, and Delta Lake contributor — and one of the people behind Omnigent, the open-source meta-harness Databricks just released under Apache 2.0. He joins Demetrios to explain why the industry is moving from models to harnesses to meta-harnesses, why token spend is replaying the CapEx-to-OpEx shift all over again, and why he's using debating AI agents to plan a matcha farm in Taiwan.

Kingsley Madikaegbu is the founder of HealID, a startup building agentic AI on top of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for one of the most heavily regulated environments there is: healthcare. Recorded at MCP Dev Summit North America in New York, Kingsley sits down with Alex Salkever of the Agentic AI Foundation to break down how you give patients, doctors, caregivers, and family members each their own agent over the same medical record — without breaching HIPAA, leaking PHI, or letting an agent quietly go off the rails.

Jay Hack is the Head of AI at ClickUp and the founder of Codegen, the autonomous coding-agent startup ClickUp acquired in late 2025. He built one of the first ticket-to-pull-request background agents in enterprise software — before Claude Code existed — and has been working in AI since the SIFT-and-SVM days of 2008. In this freewheeling conversation with Demetrios, he makes the case that coding agents and general knowledge-work agents are converging fast, and that the real battle ahead is over context, not capability.

Sam Partee (CTO & co-founder of Arcade.dev) and Nate Barbettini (Founding Engineer at Arcade.dev) sit down at the MCP Dev Summit to unpack what nobody wants to admit about the Model Context Protocol: the security model is still full of sharp edges. From tool poisoning and prompt injection to why OAuth got bolted onto the spec, this is a builder 's-eye view of where MCP breaks — and how to ship agents safely anyway.

Shahram Anver is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cleric, the autonomous AI SRE that investigates and root-causes production issues like an experienced teammate — often in under two minutes. Before Cleric, Shahram led MLOps, DevOps, and FinOps platform engineering at Gojek, Southeast Asia's super-app. In this conversation, he breaks down why production operations never kept pace with AI-accelerated development, and why the real unlock for an AI SRE isn't faster triage — it's an agent that *learns* and compounds operational memory across your whole org.

Naseem Al-Naji is the co-founder of MCPcat.io and the creator of Opal — a builder with deep roots in privacy-first developer tooling. In this conversation, he breaks down why MCP servers have become a black box in production, and how MCPcat gives teams X-ray vision into how agents and users actually behave.

Stanislas Polu is Co-Founder & CTO of Dust — the enterprise AI agent platform used by 51,000 workers at 3,000+ companies. Before Dust, he spent three years on OpenAI's research team under Ilya Sutskever, working on mathematical reasoning in language models, and prior to that was an engineer at Stripe. He brings a rare combination of frontier AI research and product-building experience to the enterprise agent space.

James Everingham is the CEO and Co-founder of Guild.ai — the AI agent control plane for production teams. With roots at Netscape, Instagram (Head of Engineering), and Meta (Head of Dev Infra, leading a 1,000-person org), James brings rare, hard-won expertise to the challenge of operating AI agents at scale.

Thiago Cardoso is the Director of Data & AI at iFood and the architect behind iFood Pago's AI agent platform. This fintech system serves millions of restaurants across Brazil through WhatsApp and the iFood app. In this episode, he breaks down what it actually takes to ship agentic AI in production at scale.

Sherwood Callaway is the founder of Sazabi (YC P26), the AI-native observability platform built for engineering teams who ship fast. He previously founded and exited a YC company — now he's back, betting that logs are all you need to replace Datadog.

Joe Maionchi (Co-founder & COO) and Rod Christensen (Co-founder & Chief Architect) of RocketRide join the MLOps Community to walk through AIDE — the AI Integrated Development Environment. RocketRide is an open-source AI pipeline platform that lets developers build, debug, and run production-grade agentic AI workflows directly from their IDE, with support for 13+ LLM providers, 8+ vector databases, and full multi-agent orchestration.

Guthrie Cooper (Senior Group Product Manager, AI & Robotics) and Nidhi Sharma (Global Head of Engineering AI & Incubation) from Just Eat Takeaway.com join the MLOps.community to pull back the curtain on how one of Europe's largest food delivery platforms is running an internal innovation engine. From autonomous delivery robots to agentic AI voice assistants, they share what it actually takes to build like a startup inside a 40,000-person company.

Pramod Krishnan is a Managing Director - AI Managed Services at PwC, specializing in enterprise AI transformation — helping large organizations move from AI experimentation to production operating models. In this episode with Demetrios, Pramod breaks down exactly what the OpenClaw wave means for enterprises, and the control frameworks PwC uses before a single agent touches production.

Rafael (Head of Innovation, iFood) and Daniel (Data and AI Manager, iFood) pull back the curtain on ILO-Agent — iFood's conversational AI ordering system built for 200 million users across Latin America. Recorded live at AI House Amsterdam, this conversation goes deep on the engineering and product decisions behind building recommendation systems, agentic AI, and why the speed of your AI's response might actually be destroying user trust.

Before MCP was a standard and before LangChain was widely adopted, his team had already shipped their own orchestration layer and tool protocol in production. This conversation is a rare look at what it takes to build an agentic system that actually books trips, runs on WhatsApp, and keeps adding capabilities without falling over.

Anurag Beniwal (Member of Technical Staff at ElevenLabs) breaks down the real-world challenges of building voice agents—from latency, transcription accuracy, and turn-taking to the tradeoffs between cascaded systems and end-to-end speech models. The conversation explores why production systems rely on “constellations” of models, how to design for non-technical users (especially in customer support), and why voice unlocks richer context—but introduces far more complexity than chat. Ultimately, it’s a deep dive into making voice AI practical, reliable, and usable at scale.

Jesse Vincent breaks down how modern “agentic” software development is shifting from writing code to managing intelligent systems. He shares how his Superpowers toolkit uses structured workflows, skills, and subagents to turn vague ideas into executable plans—emphasizing that clarity of intent matters more than coding itself. The conversation explores how AI agents can be guided using psychology, why separating roles (planner, implementer, reviewer) leads to better outcomes, and how iteration—not perfection—builds powerful workflows. Ultimately, the future of software isn’t code—it’s specs, judgment, and orchestrating agents to do the work.

Most teams treat evals like a last-minute checkbox—ship first, panic later—but that’s exactly backwards. The real edge comes from treating evals as a continuous, evolving system from day one, not a static test suite. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: LLMs don’t fail cleanly or consistently, and neither do your users. If you’re not constantly adapting how you evaluate, you’re basically flying blind—just with more features to hide it.

Conversation with Mihail Eric on how agent-driven development is reshaping engineering work, faster iteration, new failure modes, and shifting team dynamics. Focus on validation, cost tradeoffs, and what breaks when code is mostly generated rather than written.

Scaling LLMs in production requires balancing cost, latency, and performance. Through techniques like dynamic GPU scaling and TensorRT optimization, latency was reduced by up to 70%, while iterative learning and tight alignment with business goals ensured strong ROI.

Most people cripple coding agents by micromanaging them—reviewing every step and becoming the bottleneck. The shift isn’t to better supervise agents, but to design systems where they work well on their own: parallelized, self-validating, and guided by strong processes. Done right, you don’t lose control—you gain leverage. Like paving roads for cars, the real unlock is reshaping the environment so AI can move fast.

Kashish zooms out to discuss a universal industry pattern: how infrastructure—specifically data loading—is almost always the hidden constraint for ML scaling. The conversation dives deep into a recent architectural war story. Kashish walks through the full-stack profiling and detective work required to solve a massive GPU starvation bottleneck. By redesigning the Petastorm caching layer to bypass CPU transformation walls and uncovering hidden distributed race conditions, his team boosted GPU utilization to 60%+ and cut training time by 80%. Kashish also shares his philosophy on the fundamental trade-offs between latency and efficiency in GPU serving.

AI agents are shifting the role of developers from writing code to defining intent. This conversation explores why specs are becoming more important than implementation, what breaks in real-world systems, and how engineering teams need to rethink workflows in an agent-driven world.

Meet arrowspace — an open-source library for curating and understanding LLM datasets across the entire lifecycle, from pre-training to inference. Instead of treating embeddings as static vectors, arrowspace turns them into graphs (“graph wiring”) so you can explore structure, not just similarity. That unlocks smarter RAG search (beyond basic semantic matching), dataset fingerprinting, and deeper insights into how different datasets behave. You can compare datasets, predict how changes will affect performance, detect drift early, and even safely mix data sources while measuring outcomes. In short: arrowspace helps you see your data — and make better decisions because of it.

Marketplaces are about to get weird. With Pedro Chaves and Donné Stevenson: agents picking your house, negotiating deals, even talking to other agents for you. Less browsing. Less choice. More automation. Convenience… or giving up control?

A new paradigm is emerging for building applications that process large volumes of data, run for long periods of time, and interact with their environment. It’s called Durable Execution and is replacing traditional data pipelines with a more flexible approach. Durable Execution makes regular code reliable and scalable. In the past, reliability and scalability have come from restricted programming models, like SQL or MapReduce, but with Durable Execution this is no longer the case. We can now see data pipelines that include document processing workflows, deep research with LLMs, and other complex and LLM-driven agentic patterns expressed at scale with regular Python programs. In this session, we describe Durable Execution and explain how it fits in with agents and LLMs to enable a new class of machine learning applications.

In today’s era of massive generative models, it's important to understand the full scope of AI systems' performance engineering. This talk discusses the new O'Reilly book, AI Systems Performance Engineering, and the accompanying GitHub repo (https://github.com/cfregly/ai-performance-engineering). This talk provides engineers, researchers, and developers with a set of actionable optimization strategies. You'll learn techniques to co-design and co-optimize hardware, software, and algorithms to build resilient, scalable, and cost-effective AI systems for both training and inference.

Information Retrieval is evolving from keyword matching to intelligent, vector-based understanding. In this talk, Rahul Raja explores how dense retrieval, vector databases, and hybrid search systems are redefining how modern AI retrieves, ranks, and reasons over information. He discusses how retrieval now powers large language models through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and the new MLOps challenges that arise, embedding drift, continuous evaluation, and large-scale vector maintenance. Looking ahead, the session envisions a future of Cognitive Search, where retrieval systems move beyond recall to genuine reasoning, contextual understanding, and multimodal awareness. Listeners will gain insight into how the next generation of retrieval will bridge semantics, scalability, and intelligence, powering everything from search and recommendations to generative AI.

Vincent Warmerdam joins Demetrios fresh off marimo’s acquisition by Weights & Biases—and makes a bold claim: notebooks as we know them are outdated. They talk Molab (GPU-backed, cloud-hosted notebooks), LLMs that don’t just chat but actually fix your SQL and debug your code, and why most data folks are consuming tools instead of experimenting. Vincent argues we should stop treating notebooks like static scratchpads and start treating them like dynamic apps powered by AI. It’s a conversation about rethinking workflows, reclaiming creativity, and not outsourcing your brain to the model.