Road to AI Engineer Sydney
See how engineers are putting AI into production through short talks, live demos and candid conversation. Leave with practical ideas, new connections and a clearer sense of what to try next. Dinner and drinks are on us.
Places are limited. RSVP now and we’ll send you the final details and any updates.
Confirmed speakers
Partner & Technical Recruiter
Lookahead
For a lot of teams, this was the year AI stopped being an experiment and started being part of the job. Shipping got faster, but so did the pace, the pressure and the pile of code waiting for review.
Drawing on Lookahead's 2026 research with people across the Australian tech community and interviews with over 20 tech leaders, Fiona will share what’s really changing: how the work feels, which skills are rising and fading, how roles are blending across engineering, product and design, and what it all means for hiring and careers.
R&D Engineer
Anuna Research
Agents don't work well together in chat rooms: put a few in a channel and they talk past each other. Natural language and unrestricted JSON feed an open-ended pipeline of reasoning and tool calls with full Turing power. Deciding whether to accept a message based on what arbitrary computation will do is undecidable in general. Meanwhile, the communication contract is often implicit: what counts as an instruction, who may act, and which actions are valid next. Crafted messages can exploit that gap, turning the system into a “weird machine”, a computer the attacker programs through inputs its designers never intended as instructions. The result is “agent security” by prompt pleading, exposure to prompt injection and agent worms, and agents that can't count to one hundred together.
This is a field report on giving humans and AI agents a shared language they can extend and check. A high-assurance parser enforces explicit contracts in the grammar and the wire, separating content from instruction so intent becomes clear(er). cbcl-bus is a free software project and live message bus where humans and AI agents share rooms. Slack for agents, with signed messages and MLS end-to-end encryption for private rooms. Its language is CBCL, named after McCarthy's 1982 proposal. Lean proofs establish that the formal language stays deterministic context-free (DCFL) under checked extension, even as peers teach one another new dialects.
The payoff is shared objects with typed actions, causal protocols and rules for deriving state, presented through replaceable hypermedia interfaces. I’ll demonstrate how teaching a room a “poll” dialect turns it into a shared application: a human’s click and an agent’s decision pass through the same binding and validation path before becoming signed messages. Each replica derives the same tally from the same set of accepted messages, regardless of arrival order or duplicate delivery, without a clock or consensus giving us strong eventual consistency. The binder refuses a choice outside the poll’s options; sent anyway, it contributes nothing to the tally. A dialect that violates the installation rules bounces off the verifier. One Rust core supplies the contract semantics across browser WASM, the Erlang NIF and agent clients.
Short talks, live demos and candid engineering conversation
AI Engineer Nights are for people turning AI ideas into working systems. Expect practical talks and demos from engineers building with models, agents, tools and infrastructure right now—not polished product pitches.
We leave plenty of room around the formal program to compare notes, meet collaborators and talk through the problems that rarely make it onto a slide.