The Melbourne edition of the world's leading AI Engineer conference—two days focused on what actually matters: building production LLM systems, tooling that works, evaluation frameworks, safety considerations, and shipping AI-native products.
Join AI engineers, software engineers, CTOs, and VPs of AI who are solving these problems right now. Every edition has sold out. Secure your spot
Founders, VPs of AI, Software and AI Engineers
Talks from top experts
Top DevTools, Infra providers & Employers in Expo
I've looked up to Web Directions for a long time as one of the highest quality technical conference organizers in the world. As we grow AI Engineer as the premier technical event for AI practitioners, we're beyond excited to work with John and Web Directions to bring AI Engineering to ANZ!
Shawn (Swyx) Wang, Founder AI Engineer
AI Engineer Melbourne will in 2026 feature three tracks, AI Engineering, SWE and agentic coding, and a specialised AI leadership track. There will also be bonus expo sessions during breaks.
Designed for practitioners building AI systems and applications in production this track explores novel architectures and system designs, from innovative approaches to RAG and agent pipelines to real-world case studies backed by production metrics.
Sessions will cover open source launches, major tool releases, and the hard technical problems teams are solving in the field—including integration patterns, infrastructure challenges, and lessons learned at scale.
For software engineers evolving their practice using AI coding tools. We'll cover how AI is transforming the entire software development lifecycle—from productivity hacks that save hours daily to real examples of AI-assisted development in action.
Sessions will explore when AI tools work brilliantly, when they fall short, and how to integrate them effectively into your process, whether you're working solo or on a team.
Exclusively for senior technical leaders defining AI strategy at scale—CTOs, VPs of AI, AI Architects at large organizations, and the most senior AI decision-makers at their companies.
Sessions will tackle the strategic challenges of building and scaling AI engineering organizations: defining and executing AI strategy, build vs. buy decisions for AI infrastructure, organizational transformations, compensation structures and career ladders for AI roles, and navigating compliance and legal considerations.
AI Week brings together the people building with AI—engineers training models, software developers and AI engineers, researchers pushing boundaries, designers creating AI-native experiences, and product leaders shipping AI-powered products. Come to Melbourne to connect with your peers, explore what's working (and what's not), and discover where this technology is actually heading. If AI is central to your work, this is where you need to be.
AI Engineer Nights will bring a taste of the AI Engineer conference to Sydney and Melbourne in April. Get sneak peeks at conference talks under development. Have a drink and a bite to eat on us and maybe come away with a free ticket to the conference.
free, Free, RSVPs required
free, Free, RSVPs required
AI Engineer unconferences will explore the key ideas associated with the AI Engineer Conference series. From the impact of AI on the software development process and profession to the opportunities emerging with AI for new products and services. Whether it's agents like OpenClaw or Enterprise Workloads, you set the agenda.
AI Engineer Unconferences are free; just RSVP so we can plan best for the day.
Free, RSVPs required
Free, RSVPs required
In 2026 we have a huge lineup of events for you. We'll bring you AI Week, featuring the edition in Australia of the renowned AI Engineer Conference, and a brand new collaboration with UX Australia ai × design. UX Week Australia featuring UX Australia and Design Research. And we'll cap it all off with the 20th anniversary edition of Web Directions.
From renowned, world leading invited experts to a carefully curated selection of speakers chosen from a competitive CFP process, we're lining up the single best conference programme you'll see anywhere on this topic in 2026.
Distinguished Engineer
Westpac New Zealand
Craft in the Time of Agents
Founder
The Mathpath
Beyond Silicon Valley: Building AI Governance on the Fair Go Principle
Founder
Latent Patterns
Everything Is a Factory
Co-founder & CPO
Artificial Analysis
State of the Model Market
CEO
Autohand AI
Why Your Coding Agent Forgets Everything
Founding CEO & Co-founder
Answer.AI & fast.ai
Title TBA
Principal Engineer
Block
What If You Never Needed an API Key Again? Building a Mesh LLM From Spare Compute
Editor & Founder
Latent.Space & Smol AI
Title TBA
Applied AI Scientist & Staff Software Engineer
Commonwealth Bank of Australia
we fired our LLM judge
Software Engineer
Notion
Shipping Sandboxed Workers for Notion Agents
Co-founder & CTO, raxIT
raxIT
Kill the God Agent
GenAI Developer Advocate
AWS
How Many Agents Are Too Many? The Hidden Cost of Multi-Agent Systems
AI Architect
Databricks
Your Agents Pass Every Benchmark—Then Memory Breaks Them in Production
Principal Architect
When a Small Language Model Beat Our LLM in Production
Founder & CEO
Userdoc
Legacy Software + Agentic Discovery
Principal Engineer
Agent Observability: Monitoring and Understanding Agents at Internet Scale
CTO
MadAppGang
Multi-Model Collaboration with Claude Code: How to Measure What Actually Works
Technical Founder
ctx|
AGENTS.md is the wrong conversation
AI Enablement Architect
SBS
Edge AI with Direct Device Control
Senior Software Engineer | Google Developer Expert | AWS Community Builder
AI Agents Are Distributed Systems
Principal Software Engineer
NVIDIA
Why LLMs Fall for Stories (And 5 Production Patterns That Actually Stop Them)
Principal
V2 AI
COBOL and AI: Building a Self-Serve Knowledge Layer for 2,000 Batch Jobs
Co-founder
Smartnote
Why Most AI De-Identification Fails in Production, And How We Built One Lawyers Actually Trust
Software Engineer
Optiver
Close your agentic loop
CTO , Architecture and AI Expert
Beyond Forgetful Bots: Architectural Patterns for Persistent, Proactive Claw-Style AI Agents
Field CTO
Snyk
Hacking the Model: AI Red Teaming in Practice
AI Engineering Consultant
Algoxlab
What Killed My Chat-as-a-Service?
AWS Community Hero & Lead Consultant at V2 AI
V2 AI
Orbital Lasers vs For Loops: Economically Matching Models to Tasks
Generative AI Leader
Aurecon
Your AI Can’t Engineer (Yet)
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
REA Group
Our AI Hallucinated in Production: How We Fixed It With Evals
Technologist & Writer
ajfisher.me
Fail fast, fix faster: Why faster AI models beat smarter ones
Staff Builder
Stile
Building Frameworks Building Systems
Product Engineering Team Lead
Stile Education
Engineering without reading code
Director - AI & Modernisation
V2ai
The AI Control Plane: When Your Infrastructure Becomes the Context Window
Head of Stile AI Labs
Stile Education
Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Engineering
Security Engineer, previously Offensive Security Engineer
Tik Tok
Agentic SAST: Building an AI Pipeline for Rule Synthesis and Root-Cause Vulnerability Analysis
Software engineer
Tomato Elephant Studio
Engineering for the Agentic Web When 50% of Your Traffic is Robots
Head of Engineering Enablement
SEEK
Why AI coding tools might not make the slightest difference
Maintainer
StackQL Studios
Treating Infrastructure as Data: Building an AI-Native Control Plane
Senior Software Engineer
Prefactor
The Death of Documentation
Lead AI Engineer
Australian Government
Stop vibing your agents to production: applying ML discipline to agent development
Gemini Developer Experience
Google DeepMind
Building SDKs in the Agentic Era
Senior Developer Advocate AI
AWS
Your Agent Doesn’t Like Your APIs
Managing Director
Released Pty Ltd
Spec driven AI development - A Real World Perspective
Sr. AI Engineer
Block Inc
Constitutional Prompting: Making AI Coding Agents Reliable Without the Iteration Tax
Computer Programmer
apartments.com.au
AI After an Apocalypse
Fractional CTO
Self Employed
Your engineers aren’t afraid of AI. They’re afraid of becoming junior again.
AI architect
Publicis Sapient
19Cabs: 1115 drivers, 500 customers, 90 days from idea — and why we still had to stop and rethink AI
Principal Consultant
Dave Hall Consulting
Not Everything Needs an LLM
Founder and Principal Consultant, The Objective Company
The Objective Company
From AI Survey to Production: What the Readiness Gap Actually Looks Like
Director of Developer Experience & Director of Engineering Enablement
Culture Amp
What We Learned Taking a Culture-First Approach to AI Adoption at scale
Founder
ryora.ai
Get a GRASP: How to create real risk visibility for AI agents
Software Engineer
Versent
The AI Tax and “legal“ ways to minimise it
CPTO
TANK
Beat Burnout, Find Flourishing: The AI Edition
Staff Engineer
N/A
Having your cake and eating it: An implementation guide for privacy with AI
AI Systems Architect | Financial Operating Systems (Fintech)
Accelerate Funding Group
Regulatory AI: Building Intelligent Compliance into Financial Operating Systems
Builder
Stile Education
Who Needs a LoRA?
CEO
Cadence
12TB of AI coding agent logs - what works, what fails
Medical Doctor, AI Engineer & President @ MLAI
MLAI
Vibe-coded Multiplayer Video Games
Lead Agentic Engineer
SuperIT
Agentic Self-Healing in Production
AI Speaker, Trainer & Consultant
Self Employed
The Red Flags of Vibe Coding a Dating app
Chief Executive Officer
Monadd-AI
Democratizing Frontier LLMs - Cloud-cluster scale intelligence running on any Desktop PC
Senior Software Engineer
Canva (Leonardo.Ai)
Multi-Armed Bandits: The Scientific Shotgun for Evals
AI & Cloud Native Consultant
DGX Spark & Sovereign AI: Architecting Air-Gapped Agents
Staff Software Engineer
The Software Engineer Who Don’t Code
Keep up to date with news about AI Engineer Melbourne? Let us know below and we'll email you as things develop. But don't wait too long–Every edition of AI Engineer to date has sold out
There's in-person and streaming offerings, a dedicated leadership pass and, of course, the core conference.
We offer discounted pricing for self-funded attendees, startups, government, education, and not-for-profits. Select your category to see your price.
$1,795ends 3 Apr
$1,795 before 3 Apr, $1,895 before 8 May, $1,995 full price
Register$1,195ends 3 Apr
$1,195 before 3 Apr, $1,295 before 8 May, $1,395 full price
Register$695ends 6 Jun
$695 before 6 Jun
RegisterIf keynote attendance exceeds our main auditorium's capacity, an overflow theatre with a large high-resolution screen will be available.
Leadership passes and early registration will guarantee in-room seating for keynote sessions.
If you prefer your conferences live streamed, then watch everything live and then on demand with a Conffab Premium membership . You'll get 12 months of live-streamed conferences and over a thousand on-demand presentations.
AI Engineer Melbourne will take place at ACMI and Zinc in Federation Square in the heart of vibrant Melbourne.
Right near Flinders Street Station, there are numerous public transport options, and parking available close by.
There are plenty of accommodation options near Federation Square. Stay tuned for special rates at local hotels.
From early-stage start-ups looking to make their first connections to the world's leading technology companies, we'll help you engage your customers and find leading talent for your organisation.
Contact us for more on how we work can work with you to help you be even more awesome.
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Web Directions has for 2 decades years brought together leading developers, engineers, visual, IxD, UX and product designers, Art and Creative Directors, product managers indeed everyone involved in producing web and digital products to learn from one another, and the World's leading experts across this vast field.
We promise attending one of our events will leave you significantly better versed in the challenges you face day to day, and in solutions for addressing them.
John Allsopp has worked on the web for nearly 30 years, creating innovative tools like Style Master and X-Ray. His ideas laid the groundwork for Typekit (now Adobe Fonts) and Responsive Web Design itself.
His seminal 2000 essay "A Dao of Web Design" was cited by Ethan Marcotte as a key inspiration for Responsive Web Design and by Jeremy Keith as "a manifesto for anyone working on the Web." He's authored books including Developing With Web Standards, spoken at conferences worldwide, and brings deep expertise and passion to Web Directions
For over a decade, we've worked hard to create inclusive, fun, inspring and safe events for the Web Industry.
As part of our commitment to these values, we've adopted a code of conduct for all involved: ourselves, our speakers, our partners and our audience.
If you have any concern or feedback, please don't hesitate to contact us.